Ask HN: How do you manage your demo env?

[BlueHotDog2]

Hey all, we're in the process of scaling our sales org. Since we rely on demos we're exploring the best practices in managing demo environments. Our current thoughts are: - We can simply use production, but that seems risky - New features might surprise AEs in the demos, A/B tests, production data? data reset between demos - We could clone a branch of production and create a dedicated demo env, almost the same problems as above minus the features surprises. - We can simply use PowerPoint which solves most of the problems above but feels like we'll lose a lot of the wow factor of our app.

Any ideas? What are the current best practices to create/manage/update a demo environment? Share your wisdom guys!

[lottamus]

We have several cloud environments that can be spun up and deployed by anyone at the company who needs a "production-like" environment. We built some Slack commands to make it easy for anyone to deploy using a specific git commit.

We do this by building a docker container on every commit and storing it in Quay (1). This also means it's easy for anyone on the team to run one of the docker containers on their computer.

We use Gitlab's release branch flow (2). Our cloud production environment is deployed directly from our master branch. And once a month we cut a stable version of our master branch and release it to our on-premise customers.

Hope this helps!

(1) https://quay.io/ (2) https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/gitlab_flow.html#release-b...

[BlueHotDog2]

Thanks a lot! That like a great solution, a couple of followup questions: - So basically an AE spins an env prior to a demo call? or is there a demo env all AEs use? - How do you guys solve for "demo data"? e.g we want our potential customer to see how the system looks like "live". - Are you guys happy with it? anything we can learn from past mistakes?

Thanks!