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

133 pointsemilsoman7y ago51 comments

We're Emil and Yuva, co-founders of Dockup (https://getdockup.com). Dockup spins up on-demand environments so engineering teams can quickly test their code changes. When you open pull requests, Dockup creates disposable environments automatically and delivers URLs to your chatrooms; engineers don't have to wait their turn to manually deploy to a staging server for testing their code changes. Anyone in the team can then click on these URLs and preview features before merging pull requests. Because each environment has all the services in the tech stack, it lets you catch bugs which usually happen only in production.

My co-founder and I were colleagues at our previous job (for ~6 years) where we worked as consultants, mostly working on Rails, React and Elixir projects and had the luck to work closely with many engineering teams. We often saw that teams would slowly lose confidence in their code as their codebases and team sizes grew and code changes would take longer to ship. At a payments company that we worked for, things often worked fine in dev but broke in production and eventually they started having company wide meetings before teams could deploy anything to production. Wanting to help developers ship faster and with more confidence, and also to scratch the itch of writing something in Elixir, we started building a tool as a hobby project, which eventually turned into our product.

Honestly, at first I thought that if we could build it, anyone else could build it internally too and no company would pay money for this, until we actually started talking to companies which have done it. We learned that it usually takes a few months for a developer to build an internal tool that automates PR review deployments. Most engineers told us they don't like having to support this set up and keep it running after they've built it and moved on to solving other problems. We faced many problems on the way, for example - the need for pre-seeded prod like databases for testing features, being able to support architectural changes (for example, adding a message queue in the tech stack and testing it with Dockup) etc. We have now reached a place where we are able to onboard most of our customers without having to build custom features each time. We are excited to share what we have built with all of you! We are sure the HN community will have many knowledgeable engineers who have tried solving this problem and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

If you want to try Dockup now, you can do it by running the Dockup agent on your servers. If you don't want to run your own servers, you can request access for the managed Dockup cluster by going to our pricing page and we'll roll out access in a couple of days. Pricing starts at $75 for small teams.

Thank you for reading!

51 comments

treis7y ago

> It spins up containers that simulate your tech stack, but it won't be an exact replica of your production infrastructure. For example, if you use a managed postgres DB in AWS in your prod environment, in a Dockup environment, you would use a postgres Docker container that's started using the official postgres image.

I don't quite understand this. Why wouldn't I want to spin up another postgres DB in AWS for testing?

I think that's what I'm a bit stuck on. Being able to spin up a test environment on demand is cool. But if I'm going through the effort to do that, why not go through the effort to do the same for a production environment? Then I can use the exact production configuration to run my tests.