Preview Environments
Ephemeral, Isolated Environments Connected to Your Cluster
Preview Environments let teams collaborate, validate, and review new code using real traffic, without affecting live services.
A Preview Environment runs only the new or changed services in isolated pods inside your Kubernetes cluster. All other dependencies (for example, databases, queues, and upstream services) continue to run in the main cluster, such as staging, and are accessed via mirrord.
Because Preview Environments are not tied to a developer’s local process, they are well suited for:
Product managers exploring new features before they’re merged
QA engineers testing changes against realistic traffic and dependencies
Engineers collaborating on a feature in progress or requesting async feedback
This enables realistic validation workflows without cloning an entire environment and without blocking on a single mirrord session.
Preview Environments will be available to users on the Enterprise pricing plan.
What Is a Preview Environment?
Today, mirrord sessions are tightly coupled to a developer’s local process. When that process stops, the testing environment disappears. Preview Environments solve this by allowing you to spin up isolated, temporary pods in the cluster that:
Run user-provided container images
Match the configuration and traffic behavior of an existing mirrord target
Receive filtered or duplicated staging traffic using an environment key
Stay alive for a fixed TTL, independent of any local machine or process
Environment Key
Each Preview Environment is identified by an environment key. The key is used to:
Scope HTTP and queue traffic filtering
Scope database branches
Associate multiple preview pods into a single environment
Share access to the same environment with other developers
If no key is provided, mirrord generates one automatically
Starting a Preview Environment
Create a new Preview Environment using a mirrord configuration file and a container image:
Example output:
If
--keyis omitted, mirrord generates a new key and prints it in the output.You can add or update pods in an existing Preview Environment by reusing the same environment key
Targetless Mode
If no target is defined in the mirrord configuration, Preview Environments run in targetless mode.
In this mode, mirrord creates a fresh, isolated pod that still participates in traffic filtering via the environment key, without mirroring an existing workload.
Managing Preview Environments
Status: Check the current state of Preview Environments, including which environments are active, which preview pods they contain, and how long they will remain available.
Clean: Manually remove a Preview Environment and its associated preview pods when it is no longer needed.
Preview Environment Workflow
Interested in Preview Environments?
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