Ephemeral Dev Environments as a Service

Co-Authored by Frank Bagherzadeh

This is a follow-up post to “Why We Moved to Local Kubernetes Development at Clear Street”

Testing is important, especially at Clear Street. Our system processes millions of trades a day and correctness is vital in our industry. Before Ivy (a.k.a., Clear Street’s branch deploy service…more on that later) developers had two main environments where they could interactively end-to-end test their code: their local Kubernetes environment and the Dev environment. We also ran unit tests and integration tests in CI and on our local machines.

A Clear Street developer’s local Kubernetes environment, or as we like to call it, localkube, is great because of its fast feedback loop and isolation. It allows developers to quickly develop new features for their applications as well as experiment with Kubernetes configuration changes such as liveness and readiness probes.

Even with all these benefits, local interactive testing has its limits. Namely, it’s hard to collaborate with others while testing a change. This is why we also utilize our Dev environment to test our services before merging changes to the main branch. Using SLeD (Clear Street’s service level deploys tool), our developers can “beta deploy” unmerged code to our Dev environment. Once a change is beta deployed, engineers, designers, operations staff, and other stakeholders can work together to ensure the change behaves as expected.

Keep reading on our blog:

www.clearstreet.io/insights/ephemeral-dev-environments-as-a-service