One of the most important phases during development of microservices is that of manually trying out code changes. The longer it takes to get to this point, where you can see your code working, the slower will be your developer velocity.

At DoorDash we built a developer tool to create and use development environments on the fly using open-source software components like Kubernetes, Envoy, OpenTelemetry, and Signadot to enable the use of sandboxes during local development. The new tool standardizes the inner development loop for the developers and enables them to test and iterate on their code changes with real production dependencies. At DoorDash, these development environments are used by hundreds of developers saving thousands of hours of developer time every month.