What is Lifecycle?

Lifecycle is an ephemeral (/əˈfem(ə)rəl/, lasting for a very short time) environment orchestrator that transforms your GitHub pull requests into fully functional development environments. It enables developers to test, validate, and collaborate on features without the hassle of managing infrastructure manually.

With Lifecycle, every pull request gets its own connected playground—ensuring that changes can be previewed, integrated, and verified before merging into its main branch.

A Developer’s Story

Imagine working in an organization that develops multiple services. Managing and testing changes across these services can be challenging, especially when multiple developers are working on different features simultaneously.

Meet Nick Holiday 👨‍💻, an engineer who needs to update a database schema and modify the corresponding API in a backend service. Additionally, his change requires frontend service updates to display the new data correctly.

Traditional Workflow Challenges

• Shared environments – Nick deploys his backend service changes to a shared dev or staging environment, but another engineer is testing unrelated changes at the same time.
• Conflicting updates – The frontend engineers working on the UI might face issues if their code depends on a stable backend service that keeps changing.
• Environment management – Setting up and maintaining an isolated environment for testing requires significant effort.

Enter Lifecycle

With Lifecycle, as soon as Nick opens a pull request, the system automatically:

1. 🏗️ Creates an isolated development environment – This environment includes Nick’s updated backend service along with the necessary frontend services.
2. 🚀 Deploys the application – Everything is set up exactly as it would be in production, ensuring a reliable test scenario.
3. 🔗 Generates a shareable URL – Nick and his teammates can interact with the new features without setting up anything locally.
4. 🧹 Cleans up automatically – Once the PR is merged or closed, Lifecycle removes the environment, keeping things tidy.

Watch a Quick Demo

How It Works

Why Use Lifecycle?

• Faster Feedback Loops - Get instant previews of your changes without waiting for staging deployments.
• Isolation - Each PR runs in its own sandbox, preventing conflicts.
• Seamless Collaboration - Share URLs with stakeholders, designers, or QA engineers.
• Automatic Cleanup - No more stale test environments; Lifecycle manages cleanup for you.
• Works with Your Stack - Supports containerized applications and integrates with Kubernetes.