In our big series of Kubernetes anti-patterns, we briefly explained that static test environments are no longer needed if you are using Kubernetes. They are expensive, hard to maintain, and hard to clean up. Instead, we suggested the adoption of temporary environments that are created on demand when a pull request is opened. In this article, we will see the practical explanations on how to achieve unlimited temporary environments using Kubernetes namespaces.

Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s biggest pain points in that period: flaky tests. A flaky test returns both a passing and failing result despite no changes in the code. At one point, between 2017 and 2020, Slack’s flaky test rate reached as high as 50%.