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Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

codepreview.io

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Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#11

Post by AlexITC »

akhayam wrote: post #10
AlexITC wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can certainly compare these apps because there is some overlap, for example: 1. Netlify/Vercel handle production deployments while codepreview does not. 2. Netlify/Vercel have many more features than codepreview, still, codepreview is more flexible in what it can, do you want to pre-create users for each preview? no problem, do you SQS queues? you can get those, etc. 3. Vercel/Netlify are mostly about frontend pre…

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clarifying. Hope my questions help you in making an sharper elevator pitch to customers.

Thanks, it certainly helps.

You have reminded about a comparison chart we are drafted but never published.

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#12

Post by ripley12 »

> Unlike most Docker environments, CodePreview usually builds in 5-10 minutes.

Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that.

I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#13

Post by AlexITC »

ripley12 wrote: post #12

> Unlike most Docker environments, CodePreview usually builds in 5-10 minutes. Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that. I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

> Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long?

Building everything from source can take a while for some projects, for example, Scala/Rust. In our case, most of the projects we have integrated depend on Scala.

Other than that, CodePreview also provisions dependencies (databases, etc), generates SSL certificates + some other steps.

I have personally done some experiments to reduce these times and getting these down to less than 3 minutes seems doable, I have drafted a blog post explaining this. For simpler projects, it's easy to get the execution time to 1 minute.

> You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that.

Copying the binary is one of the fastest steps.

There are projects take take less time,

> I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

Is there anything more specific you can share? This is the 3rd time we work on polishing the landing page to make our purpose clear, it seems we are not there yet.

In short, Codepreview reacts to commits on Pull Requests, executing a pipeline that builds and deploys a temporal app version (using a new sub-domain specific to each PR), this way, you can preview the how the app looks like and how it behaves without pulling the code yourself, it has turned out to be very helpful for demos.

Thanks for your feedback.

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#14

Post by jchw »

ripley12 wrote: post #12

> Unlike most Docker environments, CodePreview usually builds in 5-10 minutes. Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that. I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

Yeah unfortunately I think the selling point must be misrepresented. You could build and deploy a container image from scratch on Fly.io in under a minute, and I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I rigged a simple branch preview thing that used Gitlab CI and Helm+Kubernetes a few years ago and I still don't think it took more than 5 minutes to build and deploy. (We were just using cert manager, ingress nginx, and other somewhat standard tools, nothing special other than the container registry and parameters passed to helm.)

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#15

Post by ripley12 »

AlexITC wrote: post #13
ripley12 wrote: post #12

> Unlike most Docker environments, CodePreview usually builds in 5-10 minutes. Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that. I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

> Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? Building everything from source can take a while for some projects, for example, Scala/Rust. In our case, most of the projects we have integrated depend on Scala. Other than that, CodePreview also provisions dependencies (databases, etc), generates SSL certificates + some other steps. I have personally done some experiments to reduce th…

> Building everything from source can take a while for some projects, for example, Scala/Rust.

Gotcha, true. I think you're doing yourself a disservice by including compile times (mostly out of your control) in your answer to "How long does each preview environment take to deploy?"

> Is there anything more specific you can share?

I would like to hear some technical details about the environment that each temporal app version gets deployed to. Like, is it a normal VM I can remote into? Docker containers? Something fancy like Firecracker micro-VMs?

You might not want to make all of those details public, but I need a bit more of an understanding of how a product works to consider using it.

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#17

Post by AlexITC »

ripley12 wrote: post #15
AlexITC wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? Building everything from source can take a while for some projects, for example, Scala/Rust. In our case, most of the projects we have integrated depend on Scala. Other than that, CodePreview also provisions dependencies (databases, etc), generates SSL certificates + some other steps. I have personally done some experiments to reduce th…

> Building everything from source can take a while for some projects, for example, Scala/Rust. Gotcha, true. I think you're doing yourself a disservice by including compile times (mostly out of your control) in your answer to "How long does each preview environment take to deploy?" > Is there anything more specific you can share? I would like to hear some technical details about the environment that each temporal app…

> Gotcha, true. I think you're doing yourself a disservice by including compile times (mostly out of your control) in your answer to "How long does each preview environment take to deploy?"

This is a very good point I haven't considered, I just updated the FAQ.

> I would like to hear some technical details about the environment that each temporal app version gets deployed to. Like, is it a normal VM I can remote into? Docker containers? Something fancy like Firecracker micro-VMs? > You might not want to make all of those details public, but I need a bit more of an understanding of how a product works to consider using it.

I believe the landing page isn't the right place to share these, I'm working on adding a blog where these details would be explained.

To summarize, every customer gets its own powerful VM where all previews will run, previously, ssh-ing into the VM is doable but it hasn't been required since we started exporting the application logs.

Each preview is being executed as a systemd service with nginx in front to handle TLS.

If you are interested to know any particular detail, feel free to ask.

Thanks.

Re: Show HN: Preview environments for projects that do not use K8s/Docker

#18

Post by AlexITC »

jchw wrote: post #14
ripley12 wrote: post #12

> Unlike most Docker environments, CodePreview usually builds in 5-10 minutes. Uhh... that's really slow. What is CodePreview doing to make it take that long? You could spin up a VM and copy a binary over to it much faster than that. I'd love to see more tooling in this space (most people don't need Docker!) but I didn't get a sense of what CodePreview is actually doing from the homepage.

Yeah unfortunately I think the selling point must be misrepresented. You could build and deploy a container image from scratch on Fly.io in under a minute, and I don't even think that's an exaggeration. I rigged a simple branch preview thing that used Gitlab CI and Helm+Kubernetes a few years ago and I still don't think it took more than 5 minutes to build and deploy. (We were just using cert manager, ingress nginx,…

Unfortunately, not all teams are capable of doing what you can do.

For example, I have worked with teams who have lots of hardcoded details that prevent the app to work in multiple environments.

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