What is Strio?
Introduction
Strio is a platform that enables teams to deploy on-demand environments in minutes. It manages every aspect of the environment deployment: containers, dependencies and the provisioning with data.
Strio is thought to be set up by the DevOps, whom will specify and configure what can be deployed. DevOps can also set up gouvernance tools and restrain the budget of environments deployed per month. Then, Strio is self-service for the developers. It's built around a beautiful and intuitive interface that developers can use to deploy easily environments that meet their needs.
What are on-demand environments and what are they used for?
On-demand environments are environment that are deployed quickly when needed and and can be destroyed when the job is complete. On-demand environments bring flexibility to the organization, by adapting to its needs.
Moreover, on-demand environments have many benefits:
- Environments are deployed for a specific task and destroyed once achieved. They don't need to be cleaned and maintained.
- The deployed environments are completely isolated - they are not linked to to any external component, making it risk-free to use them.
- Environments can be launched by anyone, and can be shared or personal.
Developers, QA and product managers can deploy environments to perform tests without requiring the staging environment to be available or without slowing down others if the environment breaks.
Sales representatives can spin up environments to always have one available for demos. As environments are risk-free, they can also easily provide access to a demo environment to a prospect.
Why use Strio to set up on-demand environments?
At Strio, we firmly believe in the benefits of on-demand environments for teams. However, it's time-consuming for the DevOps team to implement this kind of solution internally and to maintain it - usually it's a several months project to set up this workflow. Moreover, it's not enough to be technically able to spin up environments in minutes, some others questions need to be answered to make it useful:
- How to test a feature which spans multiple repositories - i.e. how to manage the branches deployment of different repositories ?
- How to provision those environments with data while ensuring that they are still isolated ?
- How to ensure that the organization's members are autonomous on the deployment of environments ?
- How to manage the cost of this approach : if environments are too large, if some environments are "forgotten", if the whole application is deployed each time, this approach becomes pretty expensive.
Strio handles natively all those issues (check our Features page).The only thing your DevOps team needs to do is configure Strio. Strio is conceived to empower the whole company with on-demand environments, while ensuring that the budget and security issues are kept under control.
How does Strio fit into your workflow?
Strio is built around the GitOps pattern.
Strio is connected to your repositories. By just checking a box, you can then set up the automatic deployment of an environment for each pull/merge request of a repository! Otherwise, you can also deploy an environment manually for a branch, whenever you need one. In this situation, after each push on the branch the environment will be updated.
If you don't want Strio to be connected to your repositories, you can just grant it access to your docker registry, Strio will deploy the docker images that you specify.
Pre-requisites to use Strio
The first pre-requisite to have either a GitHub account, to connect Strio. Soon, we will also support GitLab and Google.
The second pre-requisite to use Strio is to have a containerized application. Indeed, Strio deploy directly your docker image or build one from your Dockerfile.
However you don't need to have or master Kubernetes.