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We called them preview environments but yes we've been doing just that 😉

I am really curious on wether these work in a complex microservices environment with many dependencies on databases and cloud resources, Complex routing rules and RPC service calls. Wont this make it hard to setup such preview environments? also, would it work in larger teams having multiple features being developed simultaneously? wouldn't a solution like telepresence work better?

Many of the leading companies follow this model e.g Uber, lyft etc. so it does work very well with complex envs and is cost effective. You are correct that you need to address the need to isolate databases etc to have a complete solution, which some of the tools you mention may not cover.

Preview environments, remote environments, and ephemeral environments are all other names for the same idea. There are a ton of companies offering them as a product: Okteto, Release, BunnyShell, DevZero.io, Coherence, Garden, Raftt, Webapp.io, Massdriver, Ambassador, Architect, Shipyard, Roost.ai, Acorn, and Tugboat to name a few 😄

I won't speak to all of these examples, but Signadot isn't environment-as-a-service like release.com, if you look at Doordash's writeup on using Signadot, it's more about using an existing, known good cluster for testing with Signadot routing requests intelligently to work on a set of forked services.

It may not be an EaaS like Release but conceptually it's similar: do your development against resources in the cloud so you can mimic your production environment. Every company solves the problem differently.

The benefit, yeah totally, the idea that it's shifting more realistic testing left, that you're developing against cloud services.

are you using these types of environments now in your work?

The idea is to enable a “Canary-style” development model using a staging environment vs spinning up full environments

I agree on not spinning new environments for every developer or feature, a shared base environment, with proper networking rules and proxying may give the most cost effective, manageable and practical solution to the developers