MetalBear Launches mirrord for CI to Bring Production-Like Testing into Continuous Integration
New capability extends mirrord’s environment mirroring into CI pipelines, enabling teams to run tests against real, shared Kubernetes environments without deploying code or spinning up new infrastructure
TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MetalBear, creator of the popular open source Kubernetes development solution mirrord, today announced the launch of mirrord for CI, a breakthrough capability that brings production-like context from real environments directly into continuous integration (CI) pipelines. With mirrord for CI, engineering teams can run their entire CI test suite against a single shared, production-like Kubernetes environment without deploying code and without spinning up expensive and complex replica environments.
Why Real-Environment CI Matters Now
As cloud-native architectures become more distributed, the gap between CI test environments and production systems widens release risk, especially in Kubernetes-based microservice architectures. A peer-reviewed study identified challenges like integration failures, test instability, and scalability issues in DevOps pipelines. DORA research shows that software delivery performance, measured by CI/CD practices such as deployment frequency and change lead time, strongly correlates with organizational performance, with top performers delivering faster and more reliably.
How mirrord for CI Brings Production-Like Context to CI Pipelines
mirrord for CI extends mirrord’s environment-mirroring technology into CI workflows, allowing CI runners to securely connect to an organization’s Kubernetes environment and execute tests using real services, dependencies, environment variables, and network conditions. mirrord ensures all tests run with strict isolation to ensure no impact on target environments, such as staging. This capability delivers production-accurate validation without the overhead of deploying code or maintaining ephemeral clusters.
How It Works
- Real Kubernetes Context. mirrord for CI connects CI runners to existing Kubernetes clusters, enabling tests to execute against the true environment services and configuration without deploying new builds.
- Secure Isolation. Secure traffic isolation ensures CI traffic does not impact shared staging workloads.
- Faster Pipelines. Eliminates the need to spin up and tear down test clusters, reducing setup time, cloud costs and overall pipeline runtimes.
- Seamless Integration. Works with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite, and other popular CI platforms with minimal configuration.
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Improved Coverage. Tests execute against real dependencies and behaviors, increasing coverage and surfacing integration failures earlier.
“CI pipelines rely on isolation, which forces teams to spin up separate test environments,” said Aviram Hassan, CEO and co-founder of MetalBear. “That adds spin-up time, increases complexity, and still doesn’t reflect production, so teams end up paying the price after deployment. With mirrord for CI, we’re introducing a new category: real-environment CI. Teams validate code against an already-running Kubernetes environment, eliminating spin-up time while safely testing in real production-like context and fundamentally raising the bar for how cloud-native software is tested and shipped.”
Traditional CI systems rely heavily on mocks, synthetic environments, or costly cloud replicas that rarely capture the full complexity of real Kubernetes-based production systems. As a result, critical integration issues often surface late in the delivery process, slowing release cycles and increasing operational risk. mirrord for CI closes this gap by enabling production-accurate testing earlier in CI workflows, without the overhead of duplicating infrastructure.
“mirrord for CI gave us faster, better CI feedback at a lower cost,” said Netanel Abergel, Director of R&D at monday.com. “It lets us safely run tests against our staging environment, cutting our CI runtime by about 50%.”
By unifying local development, CI, and production-like context into a single, consistent workflow, mirrord for CI introduces what MetalBear calls real-environment CI. This approach increases test fidelity and accelerates delivery cycles without changing existing workflows or duplicating infrastructure, giving teams greater confidence in every release.
For more information about mirrord for CI, visit metalbear.com/mirrord-for-ci.
About MetalBear
MetalBear is the creator of mirrord, an open source development solution that eliminates bottlenecks in cloud-native development by enabling local code to run in production-like conditions instantly. Founded by cybersecurity experts Aviram Hassan (CEO) and Eyal Bukchin (CTO), the company helps developers ship faster, more reliable software. With 35 employees across 14 countries, MetalBear serves thousands of developers at Fortune 100 enterprises and leading technology companies. mirrord is available as both an open source project and an enterprise solution that allows large teams to effectively share a single cloud development environment. Learn more at metalbear.com.
Media Contact
John McCartney
JMAC PR for MetalBear
metalbear@jmacpr.com
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