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Use a Neki development branch for application development, integration tests, schema rehearsal, and other non-production work. Each branch is isolated from its parent and has its own connection strings and infrastructure.

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Initialize the environment

Development branches start empty. Treat environment creation as a repeatable application setup:
1
Create a development branch and wait for it to become ready.
2
Create a role or password for the branch.
3
Run the same schema migration command used by a fresh application deployment.
4
Load deterministic seed or fixture data.
5
Run a connection check and the application’s integration tests.
This workflow catches migrations that accidentally depend on objects or data already present in a long-lived database.

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Test with representative topology

A new development branch begins with one managed shard. One shard is enough for most schema and compatibility tests, but it cannot reveal every distributed query problem. When testing sharding behavior:
  • Create the additional shards and data topology deliberately.
  • Seed rows that cover every key range.
  • Test single-shard and scatter query plans.
  • Exercise joins, transactions, sequences, reference tables, and GSIs used by the application.
  • Check Query Insights and router metrics for unexpected fan-out.

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Use production-like data safely

Restore a backup to a new branch when a test requires existing data. Apply your organization’s access-control, retention, and sensitive-data policies to the restored branch. Delete the branch and any retained manual backups after the test is complete. Restore sizing determines the new branch type. Select a development cluster SKU for every configuration profile and a development router SKU when creating a disposable environment. If you omit sizing, the restore inherits the source profile and router settings; restoring a production backup without development overrides creates a production branch with production availability, branch limits, and billing. Development and production profile sizes cannot be mixed in one restore. Do not use a development branch as a production failover target. To serve production traffic from a tested environment, promote the branch first. Promotion is not a substitute for a production availability and recovery plan.

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Control cost

Development branches have separate shard, router, storage, backup, and network usage. Delete environments that are no longer needed and keep test backup retention intentional. See Neki pricing.

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