In a micro-service architecture - development and testing changes, in a service or set of services involved in a feature, without affecting stability of shared environments like staging, pre-prod, etc. is challenging.

We are excited to share an approach to tackle it by spinning up a developer/feature environment on demand, which only contains a subset of services that have code changes. Traffic to other services and datastores, which are not in the developer environment, is routed to a shared environment. This whole setup is orchestrated by Istio service mesh. With this, we can have multiple developer environments running in-parallel sharing the same shared environment - enabling the developer and/or feature development team to have an isolated environment to test out the code changes and rollout with confidence.

This has been adopted across our organisation, improving the developer productivity & experience along with stability of shared environments while keeping costs in check.