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Update July 2021

Santiago Arias

Hello from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team!

Virtual environments with databases#

The Spawn team has been busy looking at how databases can fit with virtual environments. We've written articles about Github Codespaces, Wunderpreview and Gitpod. We are interested in how these different services can fit with Spawn to enable you to have virtual environments that can have GBs of realistic data as well. Have a read through our blog posts below.

Collaboration with Wunderpreview#

We are looking for people who want to work with us and Wunderpreview to set up virtual environments with data for you and your team. Wunderpreview is a company that helps you get a live preview environment for every new feature – fully automated. If you have a project where you’d like to create preview environments with data, then send us an email at spawn@red-gate.com or contact us via slack.

Exploring new pricing models#

Many of you have expressed interest in finding out how Spawn will be priced going forward. We’ve now started exploring various options when it comes to pricing models, please head to our pricing page. For now, if you’re already a Spawn user, this won’t affect you, but feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or thoughts!

Try the beta#

Spawn is currently in open beta, and free to use. It takes less than fives minutes to get up and running. Click the link below to join our beta 👇

👉 Get started

📝 Blogs#

Codespaces with databases#

With GitHub Codespaces you can set up a cloud-hosted, containerized VS Code environment. You can then connect to a codespace through the browser or through VS Code. The main question we are trying to answer in this article is:

Can we have virtualized environments with databases created from backups or scripts, not just empty databases, or fake data sets. Read more

Pull request previews with WunderPreview and Spawn#

Level up your pull request workflow with live preview environments backed by dedicated databases.

WunderPreview provides all stakeholders in a software project with a window into the work in progress features of an application. By building your application on every pull request and publishing it for all team members to see, visibility is increased and feedback is given earlier, tightening the build, test, deploy cycle. Read more

Going all-in on cloud-based development with realistic databases (with GitPod)#

Throughout 2020 and 2021 much of the world moved to remote-first working through unfortunate necessity. We got used to remote standups, meetings, reviews and collaboration. Working patterns and practices changed, but have development environments kept up? We’ll try to answer that using GitPod and Spawn. Read more

✨ New features#

🤖 spawn#

  • We have a brand new website to help new visitors understand Spawn better
  • Make data image sizes display correctly on app.spawn.cc
  • Fix container creation date display issues on app.spawn.cc
  • Improve support for MySQL
  • Improve overall reliability

⬆️ Backups#

  • Improve our upload strategy to better manage creating images from large backup files
  • We are dropping support for MongoDB backups

📖 Documentation#

  • Add search functionality to our doc site

Update June 2021

Santiago Arias

Hello from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team!

MySQL 8.0 support!#

We’ve been working on supporting MySQL 8.0 which is now available for you to use! Either restore your own database or use one of our public images.

New Github Actions!#

We've also created a set of Github Actions that you can use in your CI pipelines:

Raspberry Pi (ARM-based Linux) support!#

We thought Spawn on a Raspberry Pi would be cool, so we’ve officially added support for ARM-based Linux operating systems! Want to give it a shot? Just follow the standard installation docs.

Service Information#

We’ve published details of Spawn’s hosted environment and security measures to protect your data. Head over to our service information page to read more about it.

Try the beta#

Spawn is currently in open beta, and free to use. It takes less than fives minutes to get up and running. Click the link below to join our beta 👇

👉 Get started

📝 Blogs#

The key to great database Continuous Integration is disposable databases#

Database Continuous Integration (CI) is often the final piece of the CI story for a project and with good reason; it is hard to do and much harder to have something your team will describe as ‘great’. Read more

Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough#

Development databases in Docker aren’t good enough on their own. Why? Because they’re almost always so far from the production environment characteristics that you get a false sense of security in development. Read more

Simple Database CI with Spawn and Github Actions#

Spawn’s new Github actions make database CI easier than ever before. Read more

Going all-in on cloud-based development with realistic databases#

Throughout 2020 and 2021 much of the world moved to remote-first working through unfortunate necessity, but have development environments kept up? Read more

✨ New features#

🤖 spawnctl#

  • spawnctl proxy data-container will configure a localhost proxy on your machine on the default port for the database engine your data container is running on. This can be useful for environments where you've already got localhost connection strings configured and you don't want to manually update the port when data containers are created.

📡 app.spawn.cc#

  • We are in the process of enabling users to see their resources in the browser by visiting app.spawn.cc This is now the place to accept our EULA

⬆️ MySQL 8.0#

  • We now support MySQL 8.0. For a complete list of versions supported by Spawn, please see here. Create data-images with MySQL 8.0 by specifying version: 8.0 in your MySQL source file

🌤 Spawn Service#

  • Improve overall reliability
  • Various bugs fixes
  • Improve our observability of the system
  • Raspberry Pi (ARM-based Linux) support

📖 Documentation#

  • Created new login flow
  • Move our documentation to docs.spawn.cc
  • Various documentation improvements

Update May 2021

Martin Podlubny

Hello from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team!

Migration testing#

We’ve been working on supporting Microsoft SQL Server 2019 which is now available for you to use! Either restore your own database or use one of our public images.

spawn.cc has had some changes - you can now find all Spawn documents over at docs.spawn.cc, where you can also view all previous newsletter updates.

We’ve recorded a video to demonstrate creating a MySQL database from a backup using Spawn - head on over to our YouTube channel to see MSSQL and Postgres examples too.

Try the beta#

Spawn is currently in open beta, and free to use. It takes less than fives minutes to get up and running. Click the link below to join our beta 👇

👉 Get started

🎬 Videos#

Creating Spawn Data Images from a MySQL backup#

Martin Podlubny, Software Engineer on the Spawn team takes us through how to create a Spawn data image from a MySQL Server backup.

Automated Database Testing: How Flyway, GitHub Actions and Spawn solve Azure migration#

Changing production databases can be risky, and the earlier you can catch problems the better. Learn how to use Flyway, GitHub Actions and Spawn, a new solution that provides database copies on demand, to easily test database migrations. Instead of relying on last-minute staging environments, Grant and Santiago will show you how to quickly automate migration tests against a fully populated database.

✨ New features and improvements#

🤖 Spawnctl#

💾 Backups#

⬆️ SQL Server 2019#

  • We are now supporting SQL Server 2019. For a complete list of versions supported by Spawn, please see our engine support page. Create data-images with MSSQL 2019 by specifying version: 2019 in your MSSQL source file.

🌤 Spawn Service#

  • Improve overall reliability
  • Upgrade the specs of our master nodes
  • Increase the spec of k8s nodes that hold data-containers
  • Improve our observability of the system

📖 Documentation#

  • Migrate from docusaurus v1 to v2
  • Move our documentation to docs.spawn.cc
  • Various documentation improvements
  • Added previous spawn updates to our docs blog

Update April 2021

Matt Flatt

Hello from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team!

Migration testing#

This month, we’ve been focusing on making it easier for you to get up and running with Spawn. We have amended our documents, and filmed videos to show you how easy it is to get a Spawn container running from your PostgreSQL or SQL Server database. A Spawn container is quickly provisioned with your database’s schema and data, and is perfect for development or testing against.

We also discuss the pitfalls of not testing your migrations before they reach your production code, and demonstrate them in this open source repository. To learn more, have a read of this Flyway blog we published.

If you’re already convinced of the importance of testing your database migrations, jump straight to our step-by-step guide on implementing these tests in your CI pipeline using Spawn. Alternatively, contact us directly and we’d be happy to help you get set up with migration testing in CI.

Try the beta#

Spawn is currently in open beta, and free to use. It takes less than fives minutes to get up and running. Click the link below to join our beta 👇

👉 Get started

📝 Blog posts#

Why you should be testing Flyway migrations in CI#

Bad migrations slip through to the release process despite our best efforts. Thankfully, there are solutions to this...

Read more about how to test Flyway migrations in CI with Spawn

🎬 Videos#

Creating Spawn Data Images from Postgres backups#

Chris Heppell, Lead Software Engineer on the Spawn team takes us through how to create a Spawn data image from a Postgres backup.

Creating Spawn Data Images from a SQL Server backup#

Martin Podlubny, Software Engineer on the Spawn team takes us through how to create a Spawn data image from a Microsoft SQL Server backup.

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

  • You can now see which image ID a container was created from by running spawnctl get data-container -o wide or -o json or -o yaml
  • Running spawnctl version from docker image now reports the correct version
  • Bug fixes and improvements

💾 Backups#

⬆️ Postgres 11, 12 and 13.2#

We now support PostgreSQL 13.2. For a complete list of versions supported by Spawn, please see our engine support page. Create data-images with Postgres 13.2 by specifying version: 13.2 in your Postgres source file

🖼️ Public data images#

Do you need a database with data now? We got Sakila, Pagila, Adventure Works or Wide Word Importers, run spawnctl get data-image --public to see the list of public data images and create a data container from those!

📖 Documentation#

Update March 2021

Chris Heppell

Hello from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team!

Sample databases#

To make it easier to try Spawn we’ve created some sample databases. To get started just download the client, authenticate, and instantly create copies of Pagila (PostgreSQL), Sakila (MySQL), Wide World Importers (SQL Server) or AdventureWorks (SQL Server).

spawnctl create data-container --image pagila:v11 --lifetime 1h

We’ve also created empty data images for PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server so that you can quickly spin up a blank database.

PostgreSQL 12 support#

PostgreSQL 12 is now officially supported! We have a small backlog of other versions we plan on adding across our supported database engines but we’d love to know what versions you’d like. Reach out to us via this email or message us directly on slack.

Try the beta#

Spawn is currently in open beta, and free to use. It takes less than fives minutes to get up and running. Click the link below to join our beta 👇

👉 Get started

📝 Blog posts#

Collaborative database development with Spawn#

Database performance problems can be a pain to deal with. They frequently involve large amounts of data and require a lot of iteration to get the precise data set required to trigger the issue. And once you’ve got a reproduction database, what then? How do you share that reproduction and collaborate on the solution?

Read more about how to share large databases with Spawn

Implementing zero downtime deployments on Kubernetes - the plan#

We’ve reached the stage with Spawn where the application is stable and we are actively recruiting new users through our open beta. With this extra usage, and coming from other parts of the world we now have the problem of user operations being interrupted by our deployments.

Read more about how the Spawn team plans to implement zero downtime deployments

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

Improve errors returned from our API

⬆️ PostgreSQL 12#

On top of PostgreSQL 11, we now support PostgreSQL 12. For a complete list of versions supported by Spawn, please see our engine support page. Create data-images with PostgreSQL 12 by specifying version: 12.0 in your sourcefile.

🖼️ Public data images#

Sample databases and pre-created empty images are now available as public data images. Run spawnctl get data-images --public to see the list.

🕘 How to - Scheduling data image creation#

One of the many benefits of Spawn is the ability to work with production-like datasets in all environments regardless of the size due to instant data container creation. See How to - scheduling data image creation.

🐳 How to - Run spawnctl using docker#

Did you know you can run spawnctl as a docker container?

Update February 2021

Ellie Fuller

Hello again from the 🛸 Spawn 🛸 team,

February was a busy month, and we've got some interesting things for you. Spawn is now in an 🛸 Open Beta 🛸 🎉 so go ahead and try it out! We've also open sourced our demo repository to show what Spawn can do and written some new blog posts.

We're still posting updates to our Twitter account. Give us a follow at @Spawn_Db and ask us any questions you might have.

🛸 Get started instantly!#

  • Download Spawnctl
  • spawnctl auth
  • spawnctl onboard

And you are ready to go! :)

You’ll be asked to sign in with Github credentials

Beta usage is up to 5 concurrent data containers, please contact us if you need more

👐 Open Source#

We open sourced our Spawn Demo repo, including Github Actions.

Chris explains how to unlock database testing in CI with Spawn.

📝 Blog posts#

Breaking the database CI speed limit with Spawn#

It can often feel like your continuous integration (CI) environment has an artificial speed limit on it when you’ve got databases involved...

Read more about how spawn speeds up your continuous integration pipelines

Kubernetes testing: from Minikube to Multi-tenant clusters#

Check out how the Spawn team moved from minikube to multi-tenant clusters to test Spawn...

Read more about the Spawn team moved to multi-tenant clusters to test the Spawn service

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

View database engine versions in the output of spawnctl get data-images and spawnctl get data-containers

🗣️ Organisations#

You can now see who is part of your org by running spawnctl get organisation

You can also see who owns which images by running spawnctl get data-images -o wide

If you are an org admin you can now see who owns which containers within your org by running spawnctl get data-containers --org

You can also update and delete existing containers (even if they do not belong to you) by adding the --org flag at the end of your commands.

You can create users within your organisation by running spawnctl create user

🖼️ Image lifetimes#

We also just released the ability to allow spawn to clean up existing images with the --lifetime flag (similar to how you can clean up containers). When you create a new image or when you update an existing one. Spawn will then remove those resources the same way as for data-containers.

spawnctl create data-image -f ./dev.yaml --lifetime 2h

Or

spawnctl update data-image 10001 --lifetime 2h

The second command will update the lifetime of your data-image to 2 hours and attempt to remove it when the time expires. If it has existing containers it will not be removed.

Update January 2021

Santiago Arias

Hello,

Here are our latest updates for Spawn - we've also reviewed all the work the team has done throughout 2020.

If you haven't signed up for our beta yet, click the link below! 👇

👉 Get started

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

  • ⬆️ Updated redis containers to the latest version - v6!
  • ⌨️ Support pluralised nouns in our spawnctl commands
    • For example, spawnctl delete data-containers 10001 10002
  • 🗒️ Various improvements to our documentation
  • 🧐 See who owns a data-image in your team when running spawnctl get data-images

📝 Blog posts#

Spawn 2020 in review

Update November 2020

Matt Flatt

Thank you to everyone who signed up for the Spawn Beta. We’re excited to let you know about the latest updates! If you haven't signed up for our beta yet, click the link below! 👇

👉 Get started

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

⌛ Data container lifetimes!#

When creating a data container it is now possible to specify how long the container should live for, before being automatically deleted. See the docs for the new feature Create data-container and Update data-container.

👥 Organisations#

See all the members of your organisation with the new spawnctl get organisation command. This lets you see exactly who has access to Spawn in your organisation.

❌ Just show me the logs#

When data image creation fails, did you know that you can run spawnctl logs data-image to see why? We’ve made this more discoverable by suggesting it whenever an image creation attempt fails. There is also an analogous spawnctl logs data-container command to see the database engine logs for your data containers.

🖖 Aliases#

We’ve added some aliases for the get/create/delete data-container/data-image commands. You can now use di or dc instead of data-image and data-container.

🔐 No more copy/paste of security codes#

spawnctl now authenticates using the Device Authorization Grant, which means you don’t have to copy/paste a code from the browser anymore. Just log into the browser window, and spawnctl will detect you’ve authenticated.

📡 Spawn service#

  • 🕰 We’ve made some cluster improvements, meaning more consistent startup times for data containers.

📝 Blog posts#

Development and containers - Gotta go fast!#

Development containers are part of a Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to....

Read more about how to use dev containers and spawn

Update October 2020

Chris Heppell

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the Spawn Beta. We’ve been busy improving the service from your feedback, and we’re excited to let you know about the latest updates.

We hope you find this helpful. Get in touch if you have any more questions, or if you want to sign up for the beta click the link below👇

👉 Get started

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

  • Breaking Change: Paths in a data image definition file (e.g backup folder location or scripts folder location) will now be resolved 'relative to the image definition file' instead of the current working directory
  • Breaking Change: Fixed creating redis data images and data containers
  • Support for both custom and plain pg_dump backup formats for PostgreSQL when creating data images
  • Fixed the -o wide flag to correctly display the wide output for data images
  • Resolved an issue where logs were not correctly recorded in Windows due to symlinks
  • Added a --no-headers flag to all spawnctl get commands to suppress table headers from being printed
  • Allow reset and delete commands to take multiple resource names as a parameter

📡 Spawn service#

  • Additional stability improvements for startup of data containers
  • Removed the default setting of disabling connection pooling on connection strings returned from the Spawn service
  • Improved deletion performance and stability

📝 Blog posts#

Spawn Case Study#

How Spawn has been helping a team at Redgate Software improve their development workflow by halving their automated test code, and reducing test times by 30%...

Read more about our case study with Redgate engineering team

How-To series#

Update September 2020

Ellie Fuller

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the Spawn Beta. We’ve been busy improving the service from your feedback, and we’re excited to let you know about the latest updates.

We hope you find this helpful. Get in touch if you have any more questions, or if you want to sign up for the beta click the link below👇

👉 Get started

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

Spawnctl shell completion 🐚#

  • Can now auto-complete resource names when pressing the tab key
  • The resource names it will work for include data-containers, data-images, and access-tokens
  • Now supports the following shells: Bash, ZSH, Fish and PowerShell
  • Check out the spawnctl completion command for more information

Fixed refresh tokens#

  • Tokens now successfully refresh after 24 hours

Improved error handling#

  • Display errors returned by the API
  • Don’t error on data-container deletion when it doesn’t exist
  • Return more meaningful error messages

Support absolute paths to definition files for data-image creation#

📡 Spawn service#

  • Stability improvements
  • Various website fixes and improvements
  • Increase infrastructure capacity
  • Increase container password entropy

📝 Blog posts#

Next.js development with instant dev-database provisioning#

Next.js is a really exciting framework that makes it simple to build React applications...

Read more about how to set up instant database provisioning on top of Next.js

Testing database migrations#

Database migrations help to keep database schema versioned, by documenting database changes in source control...

Read more about how to do database migration testing

Update August 2020

Santiago Arias

We’re excited to share our first Spawn update! We hope to make these updates more frequent to let you know what we’ve been doing.

This blog launches alongside the official launch of the Spawn beta programme 🎉 We’re excited to get you onboard!

We hope you find this helpful. Get in touch if you have any more questions, or if you want to sign up for the beta click the link below👇

👉 Get started

✨ New features#

🤖 Spawnctl#

  • YAML output for spawnctl commands
  • Specify new image names for the graduate command with --name [name]
  • Spawnctl update notifications
  • Additional security added to Spawnctl auth flow to prevent MITM replay attacks
  • Support multiple resources passed to delete command to clean up multiple resources with one operation

📡 Spawn service#

  • Autoscaling infrastructure to handle additional capacity requirements for users
  • Unique passwords for each data-container created from data-images
  • Miscellaneous security fixes and hardening

🌟 Spawn Azure Data Studio Extension#

  • Update extension to work with the latest API changes in Azure Data Studio

📝 Blog posts#

Extending Kubernetes with Operators#

Having attended the last two European KubeCon events (2018 and 2019)...

Read more about how to extend k8s with operators

Ephemeral databases using Spawn#

Spawn offers many advantages for teams that might be used to using shared development environments...

Read more about how you and your team can use ephemeral databases