Preview environments: Everything you need to know | garden.io

To ensure your product functions correctly, you need to conduct thorough tests. However, testing in a local development environment or a staging environment is vastly different from the production environment where the product will eventually live. Preview environments are a much better option for testing because you can have a realistic production-like environment at your fingertips. Testing in this type of environment increases the likelihood of identifying problems and bugs before the product goes live.

What is a preview environment?

A preview environment is a safe, temporary, fully functional instance of a live (or production) environment that can be created or destroyed as needed. It improves collaboration between development and operations teams and reduces the risk of introducing bugs or breaking changes to the production environment. This type of environment makes it easy to preview pull request (PR) changes in a real-world setting before merging. In addition, provisioning preview environments on demand removes the bottlenecks caused by manual provisioning.

An ideal preview environment should be lightweight, easy to manage, and should not require any complex setup. However, in practice, achieving the above with Kubernetes can be difficult. This is where Garden…