<story><title>Show HN: Layer – Get a dozen staging servers per developer</title><url>https://layerci.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colinchartier</author><text>Hey HN,&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re Lyn &amp;amp; Colin and we built Layer - It creates a unique staging server for every commit.&lt;p&gt;Before Layer, I was CTO of a startup with a 10-person developer team, and dealing with staging servers (and end-to-end tests) was one of the most annoying parts of our workflow.&lt;p&gt;Layer lets you define staging servers the same way you define Docker containers, and get a unique one for every commit going back a week. We run them in the cloud, so there&amp;#x27;s no need to pay for AWS servers you&amp;#x27;re not using.&lt;p&gt;Also, if you&amp;#x27;re running a webserver, you get a unique URL for each unique server automatically so that you can post it to a slack channel and get feedback immediately.&lt;p&gt;When we&amp;#x27;re setting up the staging server, we use the same sort of cache as Docker so that you can skip repetitive tasks like setting up a database or running database migrations if they haven&amp;#x27;t changed.&lt;p&gt;Would love to get your feedback, it only takes five minutes to do the onboarding tutorial.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>defen</author><text>How would this handle external state? I realize in general that&amp;#x27;s an impossible task, but specifically I&amp;#x27;m thinking of something like a database. Is there a way for each &amp;quot;server&amp;quot; to get a private copy of the database? Otherwise it seems like if I create a non-backwards-compatible migration (let&amp;#x27;s say I drop a table that&amp;#x27;s no longer necessary) I could break servers that were spawned for other commits.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Layer – Get a dozen staging servers per developer</title><url>https://layerci.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colinchartier</author><text>Hey HN,&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re Lyn &amp;amp; Colin and we built Layer - It creates a unique staging server for every commit.&lt;p&gt;Before Layer, I was CTO of a startup with a 10-person developer team, and dealing with staging servers (and end-to-end tests) was one of the most annoying parts of our workflow.&lt;p&gt;Layer lets you define staging servers the same way you define Docker containers, and get a unique one for every commit going back a week. We run them in the cloud, so there&amp;#x27;s no need to pay for AWS servers you&amp;#x27;re not using.&lt;p&gt;Also, if you&amp;#x27;re running a webserver, you get a unique URL for each unique server automatically so that you can post it to a slack channel and get feedback immediately.&lt;p&gt;When we&amp;#x27;re setting up the staging server, we use the same sort of cache as Docker so that you can skip repetitive tasks like setting up a database or running database migrations if they haven&amp;#x27;t changed.&lt;p&gt;Would love to get your feedback, it only takes five minutes to do the onboarding tutorial.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lyn_layerci</author><text>Hey HN!&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m Lyn, co-founder of Layer. Here&amp;#x27;s a quick 5 min demo video in case you don&amp;#x27;t want to do the sign up tutorial (even though it takes 5 mins toooo): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=PH-n70gPQgA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=PH-n70gPQgA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Happy to answer any questions here.</text></comment>