What is Environment as a Service (EaaS) and How is it Impacting Productivity?

The Main Benefits of Environment as a Service

Here are some of the core benefits to businesses using EaaS:

Increased Efficiency of DevOps

DevOps is a critical part of modern application development. Replicating a production environment containing complex configuration, infrastructure components like load balancers, Kubernetes cluster, firewall, etc., takes a considerable amount of time and can lead to errors. Also, factor in the deviation in environments e.g., Staging is a replica of production, but data, infrastructure, and configuration will be slightly different. Automating the development environment takes a lot of burdens away from the DevOps and reduces the complexity of the DevOps process.

Having the ability to automate environments using an Environment as a Service platform, you can give your distributed teams the ability to spin up and decommission the environments as needed, accelerating time to market and faster ROI.

Increased Development Speed

EaaS improves your overall development speed and ability to market your product early. As you can quickly clone your environment and testing can be performed in isolation without interfering with other environments, you can quickly roll out your releases.

Reduced Cost

EaaS not only keeps checks on the cost related to environment setup and management but also helps you reduce the cost. Let’s find how:

• You save valuable time spent on the manual setup of the environment. Note that the security and complexity when managing environments are also essential factors i.e., a Production environment is set up with a different security profile than a staging environment. EaaS helps you manage these complexities easily without spending too much time.
• As the environments provided by EaaS are ephemerals, that means they can be created or deleted automatically for as long as you’re going to use them That way, you can achieve not only scalability but improved cost control.

Use Cases for Environment as a Service

Let’s go through some of the top use cases for EaaS:

Staging Environment

Staging is a replica of the production environment but with some differences. As EaaS clones the environment in isolation, so all the code, configuration, data, etc. is separate for each environment. A staging environment is a common practice in modern software development and is the last checkpoint before production. The ability to clone staging directly from production in a couple of minutes is a big achievement.

Test/QA Environments

Every week your team has to test new features. Often, testing and validation are limited by the availability of environments on which to test and can be a drag on confidence. Manually setting up such an environment will take time, skills, efforts, supervision, etc. but using EaaS will take just a couple of minutes. With EaaS and Preview environments, you can spin up as many isolated environments as you need and work with confidence.

Migration Test Environments

As a startup or growing company, you will certainly have to manage migrations at some point. Migration phases often generate mental burdens. With EaaS, you can test migrations using a production-like environment (including data), so you know everything will work before you push to production.

Planning to migrate to AWS?? Check out our AWS migration checklist

Sales Demo Environments

Consider a scenario where you have to suddenly spin up a server and set up a demo environment where you want to showcase a product with a particular data set. With EaaS, you can do that in just a couple of minutes. This will result in faster sales and greater marketing reach.

R&D Playground

Giving your developers the space to be creative and experiment with new ideas is a great added value. With EaaS, it will only take one click for your developers to unlock a sandbox to test and play around with new ideas, without worrying about all the configurations.

Conclusion

Through EaaS, you can maximize your application’s uptime and deliver reliable services with faster release cycles. Not only does it save valuable time and money, but it dramatically improves your product’s quality as well. EaaS (and Preview Environments) is the future of internal testing environments and can bring your DevOps productivity to a new level.

How Qovery can help with EaaS

Qovery has an EaaS offering called Preview Environments, leveraging EaaS to the next level. This product is unique in the market. Besides streamlining the development process with on-demand environments, it offers a preview environment for every Pull Request (PR) on your code repository, which results in faster releases, improved team collaboration, and reduce bugs in production.

Note that Qovery runs on your own AWS account with Kubernetes. Read more...

Check out this short video to see the Preview Environment in action!

Video

Do you want blazingly fast Preview Environments on your AWS account? Give it a try!