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Onboarding Guide

From installation to company-wide adoption

Signadot's solution is designed to deliver value quickly while scaling organically across your organization. This guide walks you through each phase, from initial setup to full-scale adoption.

The Onboarding Journey
Quick value for core use cases, extensible platform for organization-wide impact

  • Quick Time to Value: Install in hours, first PR workflow in 1-2 days
  • Flexible Adoption: Start simple, add advanced capabilities as needed
  • Scales Organically: Early teams establish patterns, others replicate quickly
  • Extensible Platform: Works across different tech stacks and unlocks new use cases

Phase 1: Initial Setup (Day 1)​

Get Signadot running in your cluster and start testing locally

  • Install Operator: Single Helm command installs the Signadot operator in your cluster. See the Operator Installation Guide for detailed instructions.
  • Install CLI: Install CLI locally to test the solution and create sandboxes.
  • Start Testing: Create sandboxes using the CLI and test by hitting APIs directly using curl or any API testing tool.
Day 1 Value Milestone

Immediate Sandbox Testing: Teams can create isolated sandboxes and test service changes directly via API calls. See the Sandbox Quickstart for step-by-step instructions.

Phase 2: Unlock Core Use Cases (2-3 Days)​

Unlock end-to-end previews, local development, and automated testing workflows

Context Propagation Prerequisite

If you have OpenTelemetry or tracing tools (Datadog, etc.): You're all set! Core use cases work out of the box. If you don't have context propagation: Start by instrumenting a few key services with OpenTelemetry to enable context propagation for end-to-end flows. See the Context Propagation Guide for detailed setup instructions.

With context propagation enabled, teams can now realize the core use cases that provide the most value. Teams can choose which use cases to start with based on their priorities:

  • PR Previews: Create preview environments for frontend changes and test complete user flows. See the Setting up PR Sandboxes for details.
  • Local Development: Run services locally while connected to the cluster for efficient development workflows. See the Local Development Guide for configuration.
  • Automated Testing: Run existing automated tests using Jobs and JobRunnerGroups for comprehensive PR validation. See the Test Automation Guide for implementation.
Core Use Cases Milestone

Complete Development Workflow: Teams can now create preview environments, enable local development, and run automated tests against isolated sandboxes. This unlocks the full development and testing workflow without waiting for shared environments.

Phase 3: PR Previews (1-2 Days)​

Integrate with your CI tool for branch based Previews

This is our most common use case for teams to start with as it's easy to adopt across the organization. Platform teams can set up the CI integration and developers get benefit from PR previews without any effort.

  • Build and push container images
  • Create sandboxes via CLI in CI workflow
  • Start with a few services, then replicate
CI Integration Milestone

Automated PR Testing: Teams can now test changes in isolated environments without waiting for shared staging. Every PR automatically gets its own testing environment.

See the CI Integration Guide for detailed setup instructions for GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and other CI systems. Also see the Set up PR Sandboxes Guide for pull request sandbox configuration.

Phase 4: Local Development (Variable Duration)​

Enable local development workflows

Duration depends on rollout approach:

  • Direct CLI Usage: If developers use the Signadot CLI directly, there's no extra work involved but it may take time for all developers to download and install across the organization.
  • Company CLI Integration: If you already have a company-wide CLI, integrate the Signadot CLI into it. This could take 1-2 weeks upfront but enables fast adoption across engineering.

Phase 5: Automated Testing for PRs (1-2 Weeks)​

Run automated tests against PR sandboxes

There are two options for automated testing:

  • SmartTests: Write lightweight API tests in Starlark that automatically detect regressions by comparing service behavior between baseline and sandbox versions using AI-powered analysis. See the SmartTests Quickstart.
  • Existing Automated Tests: Run your existing automated tests (E2E tests in Playwright, Cypress, and other frameworks) at the PR stage. Most commonly, we see users running their E2E tests against PR sandboxes. See the Setting up Tests using Jobs for implementation details.
Automated Testing Milestone

Comprehensive PR Validation: Teams can now run both SmartTests and existing automated test suites against PR sandboxes, providing comprehensive validation before merging.

Phase 6: Advanced Use Cases (2-6 Weeks)​

Extend for complete data isolation and async workflows

Advanced Capabilities​

Database Plugins​

Write resource plugins using Terraform, Bash, or Python to spin up isolated databases. See the Database Isolation Guide and Resource Plugins Reference for implementation details.

Message Queues​

Create wrappers for Kafka, SQS, ActiveMQ to support async workflows. See the Message Queue Isolation Guide for setup instructions.

Custom Integrations​

Extend support for GraphQL and other specialized technology stacks. See the Tutorials for examples including Temporal, GraphQL, and other integrations.

Platform Team Investment: One-time work by the platform team that unlocks these advanced use cases for all product teams across the organization

Advanced Capabilities Milestone

Complete Data Isolation: Platform teams can now provide database plugins, message queue wrappers, and custom integrations that enable full isolation for complex testing scenarios. This unlocks testing of schema changes, async workflows, and specialized technology stacks.

Phase 7: Organization-Wide Rollout (2-3 Months)​

Scale from early adopters to entire engineering organization

Steps for Organization-Wide Rollout​

  1. Extend CI integration to all services
  2. Adopt shared platform libraries
  3. Scale testing across all teams
  4. Replicate patterns from early adopters
Full Scale Adoption Milestone

Organization-Wide Testing: Early adopter teams establish patterns and best practices. Other teams replicate the integration for rapid company-wide deployment. Every team can now test changes in isolation without waiting for shared environments.