I've seen a couple of these, and I think much of the problem is that I need to duplicate my ops work (scripts to build environments, etc.) somehow for the ephemeral environments to be created. You've evaded that somewhat by using Terraform, but what if I use CloudFormation to deploy my stuff?
I'm wondering if the better way to solve this problem would be to use docker-compose files (or k8s definitions), since we all have them checked in already for use with local development. I really just need a way to fire the local environment up on a server so I can send someone a link to it that will work for a while (and not die when I close my laptop). I don't need the full onslaught of AWS (or GCP services) when I just want to send someone a link and ask them if this CSS looks right (or put the link in a PR), but I need it to work better than a picture.
Thanks for your feedback! We've weighed these considerations quite a bit in choosing the right first step for the product.
The docker-compose approach is a valid angle — we’ve seen a couple products built around that workflow. A weakness that led us to our approach is that they generally lack support for projects that involve cloud-specific services. Most of the startups we’ve talked to already have some infra-as-code that describes their cloud infrastructure, and we’re rolling out support for CloudFormation/Pulumi very soon, so customers will be able to bring over infrastructure in any major format. As far as limiting the breadth of services spun up, we've found that removing unnecessary services from the IaC config provides reasonably good results. We plan on adding support for a Docker-compose approach soon, but we felt that starting with IaC would bring us better generalizability out of the gate.
I'm wondering if the better way to solve this problem would be to use docker-compose files (or k8s definitions), since we all have them checked in already for use with local development. I really just need a way to fire the local environment up on a server so I can send someone a link to it that will work for a while (and not die when I close my laptop). I don't need the full onslaught of AWS (or GCP services) when I just want to send someone a link and ask them if this CSS looks right (or put the link in a PR), but I need it to work better than a picture.