Developer environments become slow to spin up and expensive to maintain with many microservices. We’ve built a new kind of dev environment that uses traffic labeling (using OpenTelemetry) and dynamic request routing (with Istio) - which makes it lightweight and scalable.

You can run the dev version of a microservice on a laptop and connect it to a shared Kubernetes cluster with dependencies and test as though the whole application were running locally. Also, you can combine dev environments together to test different microservices with each other as they’re being developed.

The underlying approach we use is similar to Uber’s SLATE (https://www.uber.com/blog/simplifying-developer-testing-thro...) - built on top of Kubernetes and Istio.

If you’re interested, please give it a whirl using our guide at https://www.signadot.com/docs/quickstart/local-development. Looking forward to feedback, bug reports, and discussions!