Signadot: The Better Alternative to Telepresence for Enterprise-Scale Microservices Testing
Telepresence vs. Signadot
Telepresence is a tool for local development that connects your local workstation to a Kubernetes cluster.
Signadot offers a more comprehensive solution that supports local development, PR previews, and automated testing through lightweight “sandboxes” that provide isolated environments without duplicating infrastructure.
Quick Overview
Telepresence
Telepresence is a CNCF project that allows developers to run a single service locally while connecting to a remote Kubernetes cluster. It works by intercepting traffic to a specific service and redirecting it to your local development environment.
Signadot
Signadot creates lightweight, isolated testing environments called “sandboxes” within a shared Kubernetes cluster. These sandboxes support services running either locally or in the cluster, and use request-level routing to isolate changes without duplicating infrastructure. Signadot enables integration testing, PR previews, and automated tests.
When Signadot is the Better Choice
Signadot is the better choice when:
- You need team-wide testing solutions - Signadot is built for teams working on microservices collaboratively
- You're testing changes across multiple services - RouteGroups allow testing coordinated changes across services
- You need reliable PR previews - Signadot creates stable, isolated environments for each PR
- You want automated testing in a realistic environment - Run tests against real dependencies without duplication
- You're at enterprise scale - Signadot maintains reliability when scaling to large engineering organizations
- You work with stateful components - Signadot provides better isolation for databases and other stateful resources
Using Both Tools Together
If you're already using Telepresence, you can continue using it for local debugging while adopting Signadot for PR previews and automated testing. This complementary approach gives teams the best of both worlds:
- Telepresence: For individual developers working on rapid code changes with local debuggers
- Signadot: For team-wide testing, PR previews, and automated integration tests
This strategy provides a smooth transition path, giving teams more comprehensive testing capabilities while maintaining familiar development workflows.
Elevate Your Development Workflow For Free
Experience the full potential of Signadot with our free tier. Explore at your own pace and discover how our platform can enhance your team's testing capabilities, seamlessly integrating with your existing tools for a more comprehensive development experience.
Developers love Signadot
On the margin, with the Signadot approach, 99.8% of the isolated environment's infrastructure costs look wasteful. That percentage looks like an exaggeration, but it's really not.
Before Signadot, previewing features took 30 to 40 minutes, creating a significant bottleneck in our development. Now, that time is under two minutes—a 15x productivity boost. Signadot is now essential to our streamlined process, saving hundreds of engineering hours, enabling more testing iterations, and elevating code quality.
Signadot has streamlined our deployment processes, enabling efficient testing and reducing effort in maintaining pull requests, ensuring stable, bug-free Android features and seamless team collaboration.
With Neon's rapid growth, maintaining key DORA metrics and production SLO became a challenge. Signadot's Sandboxes solution transformed our CI/CD pipelines, reducing costs and enabling effective testing. Now, we can confidently make risky changes, fostering a culture of performance-oriented engineering.
I want staging to be in a state where I'm able to push to production any day I want. The quality should be as good as prod so that I don't have to do more work after merging. This is exactly what Signadot allows us to do today. We're now running tests before merging, which means cleaner code and fewer rollbacks.
Without Signadot, developers were experiencing frequent rollbacks of code due to issues discovered late in the staging environment. Now, the developers have much more confidence in what they are deploying, resulting in fewer breaks on production.
Our vision when we started talking to Signadot was that we wanted to have the same stack for testing and production. Signadot has allowed us to do just that, bringing down the lead time for our developers to test changes from 30 minutes to literally 60 seconds.
Benefits for
