Most organisations that employ a microservices architecture have high-fidelity shared synthetic environments like Staging or Pre Production available for testing. However, the shared nature of these environments causes a lot of challenges for developers and application testers alike. Developer velocity is impeded by the need for manual coordination around service deployments. Bad deployments from un-merged PRs, on the other hand, can affect the stability of the environment which impacts testers.

Consul Service Mesh provides powerful primitives for traffic shaping out-of-the-box such as the Service Router and the Service Resolver configuration entries among others. In this talk, we will see how we can use these primitives along with some simple automation and UI tooling to build a cost-effective preview workflow for backend microservices that is optimised for fast feedback for developers. Multi-tenancy through request isolation also ensures that these preview environments, branched off a shared baseline, are isolated from each other thereby providing stability to testers.