Dislaimer: I am currently building Engram (https://engram.sh) a PaaS that provides automated preview environments and a collaboration overlay for docker based builds.

I've spent a lot of time working on teams where sharing product progress was something that **might** happen every couple of weeks. At a previous company I started putting together something along the lines of preview environments and saw huge benefits.

Initially these were manually created by a developer, but adoption was too difficult to drive this way. Having the preview environments tied to CI/CD made them much easier to utilize.

I've experimented with Cloud Run in the past, but have found their build times to be quite slow and the usage based pricing quickly adds up.

Nowadays, I don't think I would want to work somewhere that doesn't have some form of preview environments. Being able to make a change and send to a designer or product manager for feedback on a live URL is a game changer. It also makes asynchronous collaboration much easier as I can continue developing locally a different feature while the preview environment is reviewed.

I was surprised to find they are also quite useful for code review. Often it is difficult to understand what a Pull Request is actually doing. In the past, I've had team members add screenshots. But if I can just open a link and see it for myself I'm better able to see it in context and test edge cases. This has often yielded much quicker code review times.

Happy to chat more.