Assets
Can I test with an actual database or do I need to do a fresh install of my app every time?
Yes, you can use your own database! Probo.CI gives you the ability to upload copies of your production database (though you may want to sanitize and shrink it first) to use in your build. You can upload your database nightly and always be testing against recent data from production.
Can I upload my files to Probo.CI?
Absolutely. That’s how you use your actual database. We allow you to upload any build asset that you want and then use it from within your build steps.
General
Can I use it with my other testing tools?
Yes! You can run your test suite on Probo.CI. If you already have a CI pipeline and just want to add QA environments you can run Probo.CI alongside another test runner like Jenkins or Travis.CI in order to provide QA environments.
Can I use Probo.CI to host all of my websites?
Probo.CI is not a hosting solution. We provide environments for quality assurance and testing but they are not optimized nor intended for production use.
How is it different from other CI tools?
When your build is finished, the environment where your build ran does not go away. Instead, you receive a link where you can go see the result before changes are merged into the master branch, and share it with your stakeholders. That way, your stakeholders are brought in much earlier in the process, saving the whole company huge amounts of time, money and aggravation.
How many containers can I have at the same time?
The number of containers you can have at one time will vary with the pricing plan that you select.
How much disk space do I need?
You’ll get the best feeling for it after you run a build or two and see the results. You can keep your disk space down by proxying your media assets and by truncating database data irrelevant to testing. If you think space is an issue, please contact us and we would love to help.
Is there a hosted version of Probo.CI and where is it hosted?
Probo.CI is hosted on Packet.net that provides some of the fastest bare metal servers available today. This allows us to scale up and down with the ease of more traditional cloud providers and also allows us to provide the fastest builds possible without any abstraction or virtualization overhead. The core of Probo.CI is open source so you can run a copy of it in any Linux environment that supports Docker and Node.js.
What can I run inside of Probo.CI?
Right now, you can run any LAMP stack application complete with selenium testing and Solr search. We will be adding additional images with other stacks. If there is something you want to use, please shoot us a note.
What’s that shape?
The Probo.CI logo is a rhombic triacontahedron, a convex polyhedron with 30 rhombic faces, 60 edges and 32 vertices of two types.
Security
Can my data be exfiltrated?
Our asset uploading service is a write only service to the outside world. Assets written can only be downloaded from within our infrastructure, and even then the appropriate credentials are required. If someone compromised your version control provider account (GitHub or Bitbucket) then yes, they could move the asset directly into the download path on the web server. For that reason, we recommend requiring two factor authentication on these services and carefully guarding write access to your build repositories.
If I upload my real database to you so that I can use it in my builds, does your staff have access to my data?
Yes we do. If your test instance needs access to the data, it needs to be in the clear (at least in memory), and that will give us access to it when it’s running on our servers. We don’t want access to your private data any more than you want to send it to us, which is why we recommend that you sanitize your database and remove any sensitive user information before you upload it.
If your data is super sensitive, and you don’t want to host it on a shared environment, then email us to talk about Enterprise Probo.
Probo.CI is a multi-tenant service - what prevents another user from accessing my builds?
The isolation is provided by what is commonly referred to as Linux containers (the security portion is comprised of Linux namespaces and capabilities) so the isolation is exactly as good as these kernel features. Please see the article from Docker’s documentation on security. If that’s not good enough for you, contact us because we are capable of running all of your data on dedicated virtual machines or even dedicated hardware if you opt for our enterprise plans. See below.
What if I want to keep all of my data off of your servers, can I use Probo?
Yes! You can either run the open source version yourself or contact us about our enterprise plans under which we can run Probo.CI on your hardware inside your datacenter or on dedicated hardware in our infrastructure that no other users have access to. If you’d like to learn more about Probo Enterprise, please send us an email!