Testing in production carries a lot of risk, like possibly causing downtime for users. However, the advantages of using real user traffic are many, which has led to the popularity of traffic mirroring. Mirroring can be implemented as part of pre-deployment testing, as well as other parts of the developer experience like the development itself. But, how do you get started with it?

No matter what application you’re building and who your target customers are, everyone can agree that it’s critical to avoid broken deployments. To aid in this goal, many tools and concepts have been invented, with Kubernetes preview environments being one of them. In this post, you’ll get a deeper understanding of how preview environments work, how organizations are using them, and how you can get started yourself.

Testing in production is one of the most effective—and risky—ways of testing. The ability to use real-world conditions ensures reliability of tests, as no bugs can appear as a result of misconfigurations of the environment. However, using the same environment as your users also has an obvious downside: any bugs discovered by testing will immediately affect users.