An ephemeral environment for every change.
A full-stack environment per change, without the full-stack price.
Signadot virtualizes your stack. It deploys only the services a change touches and routes everything else to the shared stable dependencies already running. Each change gets a real, full-stack environment that stays lightweight because nothing else is copied.
Cloning the cluster per change is faithful but slow and costly. A shared staging environment is cheap but turns into a queue. Signadot gives every change its own environment while thousands share one staging cluster, with no contention.
Read the architecture in the docsFork what changed, share everything else.
Thousands of full-stack environments, virtualized onto your cluster.
Signadot for this use case fit what we were trying to do better than anything else. It was a more mature solution than the other stuff we were looking at. Just in infrastructure costs, it saves us about $2 million annually.
Every environment your team needs, on the cluster you already run.
Replace cluster clones and staging queues with ephemeral environments that share your existing stack. Most teams have their first one running in an afternoon.
One primitive, every workflow.
Give agents a real cluster to validate against.
Coding agents need real services to test against. Each agent task gets its own ephemeral environment, isolated from every other task and created through the Signadot MCP server in natural language. The agent runs end-to-end, fixes what breaks, and opens a PR you can trust.
- One environment per task, isolated and reaped fast
- Native MCP server for agent-driven provisioning
- Same governance as developer environments: RBAC, audit, quotas
Code locally, run against the real stack.
Run the service you are changing on your laptop and route it into an ephemeral environment on the cluster. Your local code talks to real dependencies, with hot reload and no image builds, and without running the full stack on your machine.
- No full-stack on your laptop, just the service you own
- Live traffic and API overrides for fast debugging
- Real dependencies, not mocks or a drifting local copy
Catch integration bugs before merge.
When a PR opens, your CI provisions an ephemeral environment for the change. Reviewers open a live URL, end-to-end tests run against real services, and the environment tears down automatically when the PR merges or closes. The integration break shows up on the PR, not three steps downstream in staging.
- A preview URL per PR, posted as a comment
- E2E against real dependencies, not mocked stubs
- Auto-teardown on merge or close, with TTL backstop
Plug into the CI you already run.
Lightweight ephemeral environments built for agentic scale.
Give every developer and every coding agent a full-stack environment for every change and every PR, scalable to thousands running in parallel on the cluster you already run.
Ephemeral Environments FAQ
What is an ephemeral environment?
An ephemeral environment is a short-lived, full-stack environment that exists for the lifetime of a single change. With Signadot, it is a lightweight per-change environment that virtualizes your Kubernetes cluster. Only the services that changed are deployed, and every other request routes to shared stable dependencies. The environment spins up in seconds and tears down when the change ships.
Are Signadot Sandboxes the same as ephemeral environments?
Yes. A Signadot Sandbox is an ephemeral environment. It is the core primitive the platform is built on, used for local development, pull request validation, integration testing, and coding agent runs.
How is this different from cloning a cluster per change?
Cloning the whole cluster for every change is slow and expensive, and it caps out long before a team can give every change its own environment. Signadot takes a different path. Each environment duplicates only the changed services and routes the rest to shared stable dependencies, so thousands run in parallel on the cluster you already operate.
How do ephemeral environments work with coding agents?
Each agent task gets its own ephemeral environment, isolated from every other task, created through the Signadot MCP server in natural language. The agent runs end-to-end against real dependencies, fixes what breaks, and opens a PR that is already validated. Per-task environments reap quickly when the run finishes.
How do they fit into CI and GitOps?
When a PR opens, your CI calls Signadot to create the environment, posts a preview URL, and tears it down on merge or close. Pre-built integrations exist for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, and CircleCI. With ArgoCD, you can manage environments as Signadot Sandboxes alongside your GitOps workflow.
How does request routing work?
Signadot routes requests for a change into that change's environment and sends everything else to shared stable dependencies. It uses the built-in devmesh for HTTP and gRPC, or your existing service mesh (Istio or Linkerd), with standard header propagation. See the docs for the routing details.
How long do ephemeral environments live?
As long as the change they represent. A PR environment lives while the PR is open. An agent task environment lives for the run. Platform teams can set a global TTL so anything left behind is reaped automatically.
