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Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

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Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#11

Post by emilsoman »

nagarjun wrote: post #6

As a manager of a remote team, I can see how this can be doubly useful to me! We already use Docker for development too but reviews still involve stopping what I'm doing to pull another developer's code to test and merge. I couldn't find any documentation for Dockup on your website. Is documentation available only if I'm signed in? I was just curious to see how it can be setup before signing up for an account.

Glad you find it useful! If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for the "Free" plan by heading to https://getdockup.com/pricing . There's no setup documentation because we don't require you to run any scripts or maintain a config file. You can simply define your tech stack using our UI and get started immediately. We do have documentation for the self-hosted plan, and you'll see it once you sign up.

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#13

Post by MuffinFlavored »

I'm confused why I'd use this. My flow now is:

1. branch off of master

2. write a bunch of code that runs the risk of breaking stuff

3. deploy it to our already existing developer/staging environment

4. test it. if it is good, promote it to QA/UAT/CAT

does Dockup assume that companies don't already have the 3 main environments (dev/CAT/prod) set up?

Why would my service be worth anything in isolation? Usually when I deploy to staging, it is after I've already made e2e+unit+integration tests work locally, so I'm checking how live databases/load balancers/routers/etc. work in staging.

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#15

Post by emilsoman »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13

I'm confused why I'd use this. My flow now is: 1. branch off of master 2. write a bunch of code that runs the risk of breaking stuff 3. deploy it to our already existing developer/staging environment 4. test it. if it is good, promote it to QA/UAT/CAT does Dockup assume that companies don't already have the 3 main environments (dev/CAT/prod) set up? Why would my service be worth anything in isolation? Usually when I…

Step 3 in this flow is sometimes painful for big teams because developers have to wait in line if other developers are already using staging and may have to roll back databases after testing. Dockup gives the reviewer a chance to quickly test the feature without having to manually do deployments or start the app before merging the PR. Thanks for asking!

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#16

Post by akamor »

nagarjun wrote: post #6

As a manager of a remote team, I can see how this can be doubly useful to me! We already use Docker for development too but reviews still involve stopping what I'm doing to pull another developer's code to test and merge. I couldn't find any documentation for Dockup on your website. Is documentation available only if I'm signed in? I was just curious to see how it can be setup before signing up for an account.

Hi nagarjun. My company (https://tonic.ai) builds dev tools and we've noticed recently that companies with remote teams have been using our product for an unexpected use case. We are trying to investigate it further. Would you be willing to chat with me? If so, I'll drop you a way to get in touch and we can chat.

quick fyi, it does not compete with OP's product.

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#17

Post by emilsoman »

inscrutable wrote: post #14
heroic wrote: post #4

How are you different from Jenkins X?

yea this seems a lot like how I do things with Jenkins-x preview environments. Other parts of the stack are pulled in based on the latest version of the respective helm charts.

Dockup is like Jenkins X, but easy to setup for people who do not know Kubernetes or helm charts. Also we have features like single-use pre-seeded DBs and a deployment form for deploying a custom combination of branches, for example, development branches from two different repositories.

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#18

Post by odensc »

akamor wrote: post #16
nagarjun wrote: post #6

As a manager of a remote team, I can see how this can be doubly useful to me! We already use Docker for development too but reviews still involve stopping what I'm doing to pull another developer's code to test and merge. I couldn't find any documentation for Dockup on your website. Is documentation available only if I'm signed in? I was just curious to see how it can be setup before signing up for an account.

Hi nagarjun. My company ( https://tonic.ai ) builds dev tools and we've noticed recently that companies with remote teams have been using our product for an unexpected use case. We are trying to investigate it further. Would you be willing to chat with me? If so, I'll drop you a way to get in touch and we can chat. quick fyi, it does not compete with OP's product.

Just a heads up, on your Product page (https://tonic.ai/product) you have the same description under both "Point-and-click" and "Built-in Statistics."

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#19

Post by akamor »

odensc wrote: post #18
akamor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi nagarjun. My company ( https://tonic.ai ) builds dev tools and we've noticed recently that companies with remote teams have been using our product for an unexpected use case. We are trying to investigate it further. Would you be willing to chat with me? If so, I'll drop you a way to get in touch and we can chat. quick fyi, it does not compete with OP's product.

Just a heads up, on your Product page ( https://tonic.ai/product ) you have the same description under both "Point-and-click" and "Built-in Statistics."

Thanks. Our landing page is currently in a constant state of flux. I'll make sure that gets fixed. I'm a bit surprised but my previous reply actually generated a non insignificant amount of traffic to our site so we also opened up app.tonic.ai for anyone that wants to give the product a whirl.

Re: Launch HN: Dockup (YC W19) – On demand staging environments for dev teams

#20

Post by zackkitzmiller »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #13

I'm confused why I'd use this. My flow now is: 1. branch off of master 2. write a bunch of code that runs the risk of breaking stuff 3. deploy it to our already existing developer/staging environment 4. test it. if it is good, promote it to QA/UAT/CAT does Dockup assume that companies don't already have the 3 main environments (dev/CAT/prod) set up? Why would my service be worth anything in isolation? Usually when I…

This was a constant pain point for us as the engineering team grew. With a single staging environment, we could only have one changeset tested at a time. We built a tool like this internally and the engineers love it. When you have 20 feature going out in a week, it's not reasonable to have to wait for staging or qa to be available. We happened to call this 'review apps' but it's based on a similar principle. You can specify in the deployment tool which service you'd like to deploy as a review app, and a PR number.

This is incredibly useful with many interconnected codebases have related changes (I know, bad SoA. best practices are hard). Then I can point review-3918.SERVICENAME.service.XXX.stag's connection string to review-1111.SERVICENAME.service.XXX.stag to ensure that everything is working as expected.

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