I'm developing an application which will make heavy use of the Linode API. As far as I can tell there is no sandbox environment to test out your application before going live. I think it would be very helpful to provide a sandbox environment for the Linode API so that people can test their application before going live with it. I'd rather not make a silly mistake in my application that ends up costing me money.

+1 not a bad idea

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There are two calls that potentially charge your account: linode.create() and nodebalancer.create(). Be careful with them and you're good, right?

Once you have a Linode or NodeBalancer to work on, you can keep deleting out the stuff inside of it -- re-making deployments, configs, issuing jobs, etc. Just don't keep adding and deleting the Linode or NodeBalancer.

For a sandbox to actually be useful it would need to behave just like the real system, creating records, processing jobs, allocate IPs and other resources, have the same constraints as the live system. Very complicated to fake and would never act like the real thing.

We won't be doing an API sandbox, sorry.

-Chris

Hey Chris,

I've always been a fan of Linode for a number of reasons, so keep up the good work.

On this particular topic, your estimation of the level of effort is a bit high. I've implemented sandbox environments for complex systems myself and while I agree that exact behavior in 100% of cases is difficult, 99.9% isn't. 99.9% is better than 0, and in most cases the only problems I've run into are integrations with other people's systems.

What do you use for your own internal testing?

I'll refrain from naming names but my other DNS provider is a 4 person startup and their test API works quite well, 99.9% of the time. In a world where APIs are becoming more important, I would encourage you to not dismiss this request out of hand.

Thanks,

-J

Using Mocks is our preferred way of sandboxing web services. We integrated Linode at Skystack by mocking up most of the API. In the end we still needed to test the real thing and that had a small learning curve. The major lesson we encountered was the pricing model used by Linode. In the beginning we created and destroyed many linodes with hindsight it would have been cheaper had we just created one linode and re-used it over and over again by deleting the configurations inside it. So my advice is to mock it up first then if you must do creates try not to do too many create/destroy calls it becomes costly fast.