Hello, Hacker News! I'm Erik, cofounder of Release (YCW20). At Release we help “virtualize” your environment, so you can quickly reproduce it for various purposes: remote development, testing, staging, or even running production. But, today I would like to introduce our most popular feature that we are now offering for free: Instant Datasets!

Instant Datasets allows you to easily create multiple pools of datasets and distribute them to your teams and it cleans up after itself. Imagine you have multiple production databases in RDS and you need that data when doing testing and development. I don't know about you, but I'd be a very rich person if I had a nickel for every time a bug on production was related to data inconsistencies and only presented itself after a deployment. Using production data (cleansed or not, up to you) is a great way to get a lot of the benefits of testing in production without the downsides. Instant Datasets makes it simple to create pools of production or production-like and distribute them to whomever needs it.

We use it and love and so do our customers, so today we are offering the service, outside of Release for the first time. We would love feedback if you give it a try. Let us know what it's missing. These are things we know about right now.

Currently, we support RDS and Aurora in AWS, with Google Cloud support coming soon. Additionally, we will be adding the capability to pause databases on a schedule to save resources and money, as well as the ability to cleanse production data before creating a pool of databases. All of these features exist in the Release platform and are being added to the stand-alone product currently.

If you would like more info you can check-out our launch YC (it has more details, screen shots, and diagrams): https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/JBE-instant-datasets-production-data-for-development

Our quickstart quide: https://docs.release.com/release-instant-datasets/quickstart

Walkthrough video: https://vimeo.com/849156936

Signup and Use it: https://beta.release.com/instantdatasets/register

Please give it a try! Let us know what you would change about a product like this. We have a bunch of ideas for this thing in the future, but would love to hear what you have to say. Feel free to email me at erik@release.com or leave a comment, looking forward to chatting with you.

Thank you for reading.