Voiceflow’s architecture has become more complex over the years. From a monolithic application with two database engines our microservice architecture grew to over 40 microservices, multiple databases, and queue engines. Running the entire application on our developers’ laptops was no longer feasible while building and pushing images made for a slow, frustrating developer experience.
Exploring different tools, we found the CNCF-hosted sandbox project Telepresence and ‘remocal’ (hybrid) development environment to be the most useful: all our services run in multi-tenant developer clusters while the services we’re developing run locally with our debugging IDEs and tools. This gave us a much faster feedback loop with more realistic results. We’ve also integrated Telepresence commands into our custom VFCLI.
In this case study, we’ll explain how Telepresence sped up how our engineering team develops and debug microservices plus the benefits of implementing a remocal dev environment.