Fast time to market thanks to Review Apps

In the classic GitFlow you send your code per functionality to a staging server. That is a server on which you can test whether the code is good enough, whether it does what you want it to do and whether it is future-proof. After you have added a number of functionalities, you test everything and if everything is good on that staging server, you put the entire package of software live. When you use Review Apps, you don't have one staging server, but each feature has its own testing environment. We call this test environment a Review App.

With Review Apps you can test your software per functionality and you no longer have to wait for everything to be updated. This drastically reduces the processing time of all your tickets; something can be live within a week where in the past it would have taken you 5 to 6 weeks. By splitting the updates you lower the chance of errors. Review Apps are a means to enable continuous deployment. The main business value is that you are faster to market with what you have come up with. You have an idea and it can be in production a week later, without compromising on quality. That's worth money!

New functionalities live within a week, reduced chance of errors and no compromise on quality; that almost sounds too good to be true. You’re right! There's a catch in the form of server capacity. If each functionality needs its own piece of server space, it quickly becomes a burden. Fortunately, we have found wonderful solutions for this in the form of Kubernetes/Knative. By organizing the server load efficiently, we balance the server load so it doesn't become a problem.