Introducing Kinvey Service Environments

Kinvey Services enable developers to connect to external systems or implement custom logic. With the new Kinvey Service Environments feature, you can create multiple environments to streamline development and testing.

Kinvey Services enable developers to connect to external systems or implement custom logic. For example, you could create a service to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server database, authenticate against ADFS or implement a piece of logic that orchestrates data from three different REST endpoints.

Apps on Kinvey use environments to represent stages of app development. Typically, an app will have multiple environments for development, testing and production. With our new Kinvey Service Environments feature, we are extending the notion of environments to services. Over time, we’ve seen that many of our customers connect to different third-party data/auth source instances at various stages of development. For example, when your app is being developed, you probably want to use a test SQL Server instance, not your production instance. One way to accomplish this today is by creating multiple copies of a service and then modifying the copies to represent different stages of development.

The new Service Environments feature lets you create multiple environments for a service, thereby significantly streamlining this process. Another significant benefit is that services can now be migrated from one environment to another (e.g. from DEV to PROD). The migration wizard in the Kinvey console presents options to migrate services together with app environments. This ensures that collections mapped to a service in DEV can remain mapped to the same service in PROD.

Service Environments is currently available as an early adopter feature. We’d love to have developers try it and share their experience with us. If you’re interested in getting access to Service Environments, get in touch!