Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) as a Technique to Raise Productivity in Teams

EaaS adds a layer on top of the infrastructure layer, allowing businesses to deploy whole application environments with the same consistency and dependability.

Within an organization, various teams find EaaS to be highly helpful. In this article, we’ll examine the fundamental ideas behind EaaS, its general significance, how it simplifies DevOps, and some typical EaaS solutions.

What is Environment as a Service (EaaS)?

EaaS adds a layer on top of the infrastructure layer, allowing businesses to deploy whole application environments with the same consistency and dependability. Within an organization, various teams find EaaS to be highly helpful.

In this article, we’ll examine the fundamental ideas behind EaaS, as well as its general significance, how it simplifies DevOps, and some typical EaaS solutions.

The term “environment as a service,” or “EaaS,” refers to a service in which the environment and the application are executed concurrently and are subject to version control.

A need for better apps arises when businesses expand and develop. And making changes to current systems may be expensive in terms of the environment, the necessary tools, or even the infrastructure.

EaaS is highly helpful in situations like these since it may enhance overall scalability and the effectiveness of DevOps activities inside a business. 

EaaS provides an isolated environment for your application that may contain all of your codes, libraries, infrastructure, settings, and applications. In essence, EaaS addresses developer productivity issues by providing settings that make it simple for developers to test and mimic real-world uses of their system. EaaS is an extension of IaaS.

Why is EaaS important?

Developers within organizations frequently wish to try or create demo systems. The goal of the testing and staging procedure aims to collect feedback on their various application functions before deploying to production. The testing process is advantageous in many ways, including ensuring that only reliable and high-quality systems are released into production, accelerating the development cycle, and improving stakeholder understanding. EaaS is a fantastic developer tool since it enables testing and simulation in transient environments.

Building in an ever-changing environment

In software development, functionalities are constantly changing. Therefore, it is necessary for all project stakeholders to test features before they are made public. The ability to create ephemeral environments has proven to be quite valuable. When necessary, one may spin up these environments from pull requests and shut them down when no longer required. However, building systems that automatically produce these settings as needed takes a lot of work. This is why teams have well received the development of EaaS service providers. It gives them a faster way to test early and enables project managers to ensure that the product is still developed under requirements specified earlier in the projects.

EaaS technologies make it easier for stakeholders inside an organization to keep up with this ever-changing setting, by helping stakeholders establish ephemeral, on-demand, or staging environments. EaaS tools simplify constructing and managing these environments on a budget. The process of developing environments is made faster by making it simpler to automate.

EaaS use cases

Imagine you are developing software as a service, but you are only allowing people into your beta testing program. In this case, you include a button on your website that will enable users to request a demo. Now a prospective customer finds your website and asks for a demo. The next stage is to offer a proof of concept to this intended user.

EaaS can help you provide your application in a staging environment. Essentially, this environment is a copy of your production environment. EaaS tools simply assist you with duplicating the production environment and all of its elements (e.g., the codes, settings, and deployment configurations). These technologies enable you to quickly create these environments for your clients, providing them with a trial version of your software. Consequently, even before the application is finished, you may present your products to clients more quickly.

EaaS also allows developers to be more creative by constructing settings similar to sandboxes in which they can experiment with new ideas without having to set up new setups or recreate current ones.

The EaaS approach is scalable and cost-effective. Only the resources you use and the time your server is online are subject to payment. So, if you need to submit a proof of concept to a stakeholder, you just need to pay for the time the environment will be operational.

Benefits of EaaS to an organization

EaaS can be very beneficial to different teams within an organization, from sales to marketing to business operations. Businesses frequently utilize Environment as a Service (EaaS) for internal testing, development, and demonstrations. Other teams besides the engineering team may find it to be of great help. The ability to see a project version and test the entire system becomes crucial for non-technical stakeholders in many firms anytime initiatives are being built. They may not have a high degree of understanding of the project during the idea phase. When this happens, EaaS is really helpful to them.

Establishing test environments helps the engineering and product teams express their ideas more effectively because they can only afford to build once, owing to time constraints and other issues. When problems arise, they may be quickly found in the original solution since the testing environments are perfect clones of the system that will eventually be deployed. Business and sales teams must be able to test products before they are made available to the general public because they are responsible for approaching potential customers (hence the need to understand how the system works). And for tasks like budget allocation and other financial-related duties, they need to know if the capital requested is a reasonable ask.

Sales teams may benefit significantly from EaaS as well! Product demonstrations have been quite helpful for sales teams in recent years. They assist sales teams in providing demonstrable evidence of how products function to aid customers in making buying decisions. Since most demos include some sort of data entry, it is quite helpful to have a distinct environment from the actual environment that can accommodate all the test settings.

EaaS helps company teams tremendously with marketing, customer success, sales, sales control, and so much more!

How does EaaS help improve DevOps team productivity

EaaS may be extremely helpful to engineering and product teams in addition to business teams. EaaS tools may be quite beneficial when developing applications for several reasons. These technologies also assist development teams in creating ephemeral environments, which aid in accelerating and enhancing the software development lifecycle. A few advantages of this service include;

1. Testing—One of the main benefits of EaaS, as previously mentioned, is the way it encourages a scalable and stress-free testing culture in organizations. Avoiding re-work is the primary goal of testing, especially testing incrementally. And EaaS is a great assistance in this. By establishing testing environments, stakeholders may provide input as soon as possible during the development process, assisting teams in bringing quality products to market more rapidly. Stakeholders won’t have to wait until the end of the development phase to check out the various features and provide input. If this occurs, the development team will be forced to start over to suit the modifications, which takes time!
2. Less development time—Since it is crucial for DevOps teams to set up testing environments for products being created, doing so takes a lot of time when done manually. Even worse, they frequently devise solutions that take a lot of manual input and don’t scale. EaaS steps in to offer assistance in this. Instead of manually building up testing environments, EaaS tools handle most of the logic required to spin up testing environments.
3. New feature testing and experimentation—This is crucial for teams. Developers often strive to explore and discover novel solutions since ideas are continuously changing and growing. However, in static, non-replicable settings, this becomes incredibly challenging. It tends to muck up an existing solution and delays the rest of the team, which may be working on other system components. With the help of EaaS, it’s simple to create environments where developers can quickly reproduce an existing solution and try experimenting with and adding features to observe how various systems respond to the new features. The functioning solution is unaffected, and it is less expensive to accomplish it this way.
4. Cost—Teams spend less time and money attempting to build up testing environments when using EaaS. EasS also aids in handling the difficulties associated with setting up development, testing, or production environments while guaranteeing the security of each environment. The cost control of EaaS is what makes it so beautiful. The capability to instantly build and remove environments when not required. Doing this will save money on trying to maintain servers while they are not in use. Additionally, the cost of supporting and maintaining apps is lower.
5. Ease of update and feedback collection—EaaS solutions facilitate development more quickly and enable environment modification from any location. It enables developers to establish isolated testing environments without affecting the live environment. Feedback is gathered fast in this method, and modifications or revisions may be made just as quickly. Users in various contexts can more easily obtain features as they become available thanks to the ability to update software from anywhere without having to install the upgrades themselves.

Common EaaS tools

It is sometimes advisable to use pre-existing solutions that were created to assist you in spinning up environments in minutes because building up your EaaS tools might require a lot of time, money, and skill. Here are a few common platforms for “Environment as a Service”:

1. Roost: is an EaaS platform that automatically identifies the environment configuration necessary to test and validate code changes. It also produces an ephemeral pre-production environment on demand. It automatically tests code modifications using the most recent version while searching source repositories for environment settings.
2. Bunnyshell: generates and manages production replica environments for development, testing, and staging. It comes with a robust REST API for already-available CI/CD and DevOps technologies, allowing developers to quickly deploy environments from their release process.
3. Qovery: is a platform that enables developers to easily replicate their infrastructure and build environments that are similar to those in production in their AWS account; it supports ephemeral environments.
4. ReleaseHub: helps create ephemeral environments which mimic production environments and can be spun up and down on demand. It creates an on-demand environment for development, staging, and production.

Conclusion

Teams can deliver exceptional services and products more quickly and effectively using EaaS. It is widely acknowledged by teams seeking to optimize their development life cycles and other processes. Organizations may profit from EaaS in various ways, including business, sales, and product development. These advantages all work together to offer a service that is dependable and of excellent quality. Additionally, it may increase DevOps productivity by giving them a better platform for testing and managing the entire system. This gives them access to environments where they can replicate anything they want without writing new code or even testing new functions without changing their current solution. In this manner, businesses may create effective and scalable products without compromising quality.