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Overview

Introduction​

Welcome to the official documentation for Signadot.

Signadot is a Kubernetes-native platform that accelerates the development of complex, distributed applications. You can use it to ship faster and with more confidence by getting high-fidelity, ephemeral environments for every code change—whether you're building traditional microservices or cutting-edge AI-powered agents.

Signadot Shifts Integration Testing Left

Core Capabilities​

Developer Environments​

  • Local Development: Test your agentic logic or service changes from your local workstation against real dependencies—like production-scale databases or vector stores—in a shared cluster environment, all without building images or pushing code.
  • Pull Request Previews: Create isolated, full-stack environments for each PR. This allows you to visually inspect and validate changes—from UI tweaks to new agent prompts—in the context of all real dependencies, including databases, RAG pipelines, and third-party LLM APIs.

Test Environments​

  • Integration & E2E Testing: Run complex integration and end-to-end test suites against ephemeral, production-like environments on every PR. Reliably test the full chain of interactions between your services, from the API gateway down to the database and 3rd party APIs, catching integration issues before they merge.

Smart Tests​

  • Contract Testing: Validate API behavior without writing brittle assertions. AI powered "Smart Diff" automatically compares the output of a new version against the baseline, allowing you to assess the impact of a change by observing the resulting difference in behavior.
  • API Validation: Effortlessly create synthetic smoke tests for any API endpoint to perform continuous health monitoring.

How It Works​

Signadot installs into your Kubernetes cluster and connects to a remote control plane. It creates isolated sandboxes within shared clusters through several isolation mechanisms.

Request routing is handled either by the built-in devmesh for simple HTTP/gRPC traffic, or through service mesh integration (Istio, Linkerd) for advanced use cases. Both approaches use standard header propagation protocols like OpenTelemetry or B3 to split traffic between sandbox and baseline environments.

For asynchronous workflows, Signadot provides message queue isolation through libraries supporting Kafka, RabbitMQ, and other message queues. These libraries create sandbox-specific topics and queues, maintaining message ordering while automatically cleaning up resources when sandboxes are deleted.

Data isolation is achieved through resource plugins for databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL. These plugins create temporary schemas or databases for sandboxes with minimal overhead, enabling proper isolation of data changes while maintaining efficiency in shared resources.

This architecture is similar to systems like SLATE at Uber and Staging Overrides at Lyft.

Key Benefits​

  1. Resource Efficiency: Signadot creates lightweight sandboxes that share a single Kubernetes cluster. By sharing resources across sandboxes instead of duplicating entire environments, it dramatically reduces infrastructure costs and operational overhead.
  2. Shift-Left Testing: Teams run integration, end-to-end, and contract tests during development. Contract testing with Smart Diff provides zero-maintenance API validation. This enables early issue detection and faster feedback cycles when changes are cheapest to fix.
  3. Developer Experience: A unified platform for development and testing eliminates juggling multiple tools. Developers use consistent workflows whether running local changes, creating PR previews, or executing tests.
  4. High-Fidelity Environments: Teams test against production-grade data and real dependencies without mocks. Isolated sandboxes in shared environments enable safe testing without disrupting others.

Getting Started​

For detailed architecture and concepts, see our technical documentation.