Your CI GitFlow is Broken
GitFlow with a single testing environment: what's wrong?
When developers' teams use GitFlow, 1 branch for staging and 1 branch for production are created and live in parallel. The process is simple, once a feature branch is done, it is merged back into the staging branch - which is associated with a testing environment. All the tests from this environment must be green to proceed and merge the staging into the production branch - which will lead to releasing the feature. A picture is worth a thousand words; here is what a traditional GitFlow looks like
But here are the main issues of using a single testing environment.
Slow release cycles
With a single testing environment, the testing pipeline is a SPOF (Single Point of Failure) since every developer relies on it to finish their work.
A broken pipeline delays all the features that were supposed to be released. Plus, it becomes a very stressful experience for the person responsible for fixing it.
Does not scale
The more the development team grows, the less they can ship fast since they are all contended to wait for their turn to run their tests in a single production-like environment.
Waste of money (and not green 🌎)
Most of the time, development teams let their testing environment running 24/7, which is an important loss of money. Let's say your testing environment costs you $1000/month and you use it only 200 hours per week. By running it 24/7, you lose ~$700/month. Plus, in a world where we need to take care of our planet, unused resources must be released.
Some pros
It will not be fair to criticize this kind of architecture since it is still very popular - and for very good reasons - the simplicity of setup and the ease of maintenance.
The GitFlow Cure: Preview Environments
A valid solution that would be to provide a dedicated testing environment for every Pull Request - this is what we call Ephemeral Environment or Preview Environment. The concept is simple. Instead of being forced to merge your feature into a staging branch to test the feature in a single testing environment, a production-like environment is created for each Pull Request opened.
The environment will have everything similar (backend, frontend, database...) to the production to test in the best conditions. Developers, QA, Product Managers, and all people in the product development can share Preview URLs to test and validate the new feature.
Once the Pull Request is merged or closed, the environment is destroyed, and the resources are released! Then developers can now test and release features in parallel without having to wait for each other! The GitFlow is fixed!
Since Preview Environments are dynamic, on-demand, and created automatically, they provide additional benefits such as:
- being always in sync with the production
- cost-efficient since they are created only when necessary and destroyed when no longer used
Here is a demo example of a Preview Environment with Qovery
The only reproach we can do on Preview Environments is that it is complex to build a reliable system, working with full-stack applications and microservices. Plus, the maintenance cost can be higher than a single static testing environment.
Conclusion
In this article, we have seen how to reconcile the GitFlow methodology with a testing flow. Preview Environment is the key to helping the developers team to test and release features faster than before. Even if implementing a PReview Environment system is complex, solutions exist - Qovery, for instance, provides a platform to get the Preview Environments in less than 30 minutes with zero maintenance cost.
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