The Battle of Ephemeral Environments, March 2019
Full Stack Engineering Meetup was back with another event at Greenhouse’s office. Both speakers gave talks on their teams’ approaches to solving a problem all growing engineering departments face — the sharing of a limited number of development environments. Below are each of the speakers’ intros and talk abstracts.
Jules Terrien, Software Engineer @ Wonder
Title: Make QA Easier with Wonqa, A New Tool to Create Branch-Specific QA Environments in AWS
Jules is a software engineer at Wonder where he’s worked on the full stack from React components to NodeJS applications and infrastructure projects. Before Wonder, Jules was at Nova Credit, a fintech startup based in San Francisco and prior to becoming a software engineer, Jules helped start a couple startups in and outside of tech.
Talk Abstract: Wonqa is an open source library released by the Wonder team last year to help teams easily create QA environments. Prior to writing and using Wonqa, the Wonder team operated with a single QA environment which caused a number of problems as engineers had to synchronize deploys to avoid conflicts and allow product teams to QA accurately. With Wonqa, Wonder engineers can create QA environments per branch, hosted on custom domains, at the click of a button. Wonqa uses a number of awesome tools to make this possible including AWS, Docker and DNSimple/Certbot.
Check out Jules’ presentation here!
Paul Alvarez, Software Engineer @ Greenhouse
Title: Ephemeral Dev Environments at Greenhouse with Dajoku
Paul Alvarez is a developer of internal tools and services at Greenhouse. He didn’t coin the name “Dajoku” but he likes it very much. He enjoys playing guitar and bass in progressive rock bands.
Talk Abstract: This talk will cover Greenhouse’s solution to a problem all growing engineering teams face at some point. You’ve got an increasing number of developers simultaneously working on more and more branches of code, with a QA team to match. But what happens when the number of available environments stays constant? Enter Dajoku. With the ability to scale up and down pre-seeded environments within minutes, Slack messages like “@channel any of the dev1-dev9 envs free?” are no longer required to get code changes in front of others.
Check out Paul’s talk here!
