Noah: An Automated Environment Management Platform for Rapid Test Environment Provisioning at Qunar

Author Background Cheng Xiao, formerly of GE Healthcare and IBM CDL, joined Qunar in 2013 and now leads the tool development team for the Noah environment management platform.

Problem Statement Rapid product iteration at Qunar requires frequent, reliable test environments, but teams often face missing, outdated, or hard‑to‑maintain environments due to system complexity, lengthy approval processes, and manual setup.

Why It Is Hard 1. The system consists of many modules and components, requiring deep knowledge of dependencies and deployment order. 2. Provisioning involves server requests, permission grants, configuration, and coordination across multiple departments. 3. Even with expertise, the process is time‑consuming and prone to delays. 4. Maintaining multiple parallel environments leads to configuration drift and failures.

Solution: Noah Noah provides a one‑click solution to create a complete, isolated test environment without manual permissions or maintenance, allowing users to spin up, use, and destroy environments instantly.

What Is Noah Noah is an environment management platform that integrates system orchestration, resource allocation, environment creation, application deployment, and operational tools. It evolved from three stages: manual Wiki documentation, scripted shell/salt automation, and finally the Noah platform that generates environments from templates.

Architecture A Noah environment includes network, application, and storage layers. Templates define all components, dependencies, and deployment order, serving as a living Wiki. The platform offers both Web UI and API services, with modules for template management, environment generation, deployment, and auxiliary features such as web terminals, remote debugging, host synchronization, and salt scripts.

How Noah Addresses Pain Points 1. Reduces learning cost by exposing system composition through templates. 2. Automates the lengthy provisioning workflow—machine allocation, account creation, DB provisioning, configuration, deployment—cutting a week‑long setup to under ten minutes for a 40‑plus‑application system. 3. Eliminates manual maintenance of multiple environments; environments are immutable and destroyed after use, with template accuracy ensuring consistency.

Usage Users create or update templates that capture all required applications, databases, components, and their relationships. Once a template is ready, clicking “Generate Project Environment” creates the full environment automatically. Deployment pages allow specifying code branches for each application, triggering automated deployment and providing real‑time progress logs.

Practice at Qunar Noah now serves eight departments, managing 44 business lines, over 400 environments, 3,549 databases, 1,629 applications, and more than 8,000 servers, supporting 872 active users.

Future Directions The team aims to further reduce environment creation time, explore alternatives to the machine buffer pool, improve node monitoring and logging, and enhance self‑service and operational efficiency.