The story of t-env: Scaling a platform to impriove the volocity of hundreds of developers

Okteto: Ephemeral environents for testing

History

• Starting point: Local Dev -> Setup for new devices or devs is realy slow (on average 10hrs a week)
• Next Idea: EC2 Instances with a fancy docker-compose and scripts -> No more local dev
• Problems: Still complex - just in the cloud, manual updates, allways-on required (no working in the train)
• Risks: Developers will just create workarounds and shadow it

T-Env

• Baseline: Setup an environment on kubernetes for each dev with ci/cd
• Okteto: A single command to enter dev mode t dev start with file sync from local
• Implementation: Wrapper arount the okteto cli
• Why: Becaus dev seems to love the cli
• Self service observability for troubleshooting in your env

Used Open soruce Tools: Pulumi, Grafana, Okteto, K8s

Did it work?

• The time to test is way faster
• The path was clear
• The environments should be ephemeral but devs don’t like that -> They decided to allow for long lived envs
• Cloud cost is relatively high with long living envs -> They implemented a sleep system based on dev timezone (or manual wake-up)

The futuuuuure

• The company is not getting smaller -> More devs annd more services
• AI agents will write some of the code in the future
• Idea: Only run modified code in env instead of everything