Preview environments are a lot like microservices in that they’re much more of an organisational tool than they are a technology tool. They’re great for organis

Preview environments are a lot like microservices in that they’re much more of an organisational tool than they are a technology tool. They’re great for organisations with many independent parallel streams of work owned by different people but they can be a headache for smaller teams where non-engineers are thinking about the product as a whole, not individual pieces. I made the mistake of bringing preview environments into a small company and quickly discovered I was pushing responsibility for reconciling different streams of work onto the non-technical people. Traditional staging environments that sit as the stage before production are problematic because they become a living thing that has to be maintained, but there’s a middle ground between preview environments and traditional staging environments: one staging environment that is ephemeral specifically for the next release, with the ability to spin up more if a situation necessitates it (e.g: a long term project that needs to be tested while other streams of work continue).