Level up your pull request workflow with live preview environments backed by dedicated databases
WunderPreview provides all stakeholders in a software project with a window into the work in progress features of an application. By building your application on every pull request and publishing it for all team members to see, visibility is increased and feedback is given earlier, tightening the build, test, deploy cycle.
What can I preview?
Essentially, anything that builds as a Docker container and exposes a TCP port to which other services can connect. …
Spawn’s new Github actions make database CI easier than ever before
Running tests against databases in CI pipelines is an essential part of testing your application.
Provisioning databases in CI pipelines can be hard work, however. Broadly speaking you have two options:
- Have all your pipelines use shared databases
- Use Docker to run containerised database instances
The first option has the advantage that you can test against real data, perhaps a recently restored copy of production, but it effectively serializes your pipelines as they contend for the shared database. …
Spawn enables teams to collaborate effectively to solve database performance problems
Database performance problems can be a pain to deal with. They frequently involve large amounts of data and require a lot of iteration to get the precise data set required to trigger the issue. And once you’ve got a reproduction database, what then? How do you share that reproduction and collaborate on the solution?
Spawn enables a workflow that makes it much easier to collaborate on reproducing and fixing database performance issues. Iterate on the reproduction by saving revisions of your database state and sharing the resulting image with people on your team with the know-how to fix the problem.
Reproduce
With Spawn, no more shared development databases
The shared database paradigm is a common development workflow where all developers on a team share access to one database that they all use to support application development. This workflow is usually adopted because it’s easy. There is no need to provision infrastructure for each engineer, so setup costs are minimal. But it causes pain and bottlenecks for engineers who are always at risk of making changes that break each other’s work.
Spawn allows us to make database provisioning for development pain-free and let every engineer have their own dedicated database environment without the need to provision any extra infrastructure.
Shared Databases
Spawn is a new service in development at Redgate Foundry. Spawn provisions ephemeral, cloud-hosted database servers that can be snapshotted and rolled back in seconds. Developers can forget about managing and administering database server infrastructure themselves and instead simply request a new database server from the command line and get a connection string back in seconds.
Spawn offers many advantages for teams that might be used to using shared development environments or local database servers running on developers’ machines. …
