Runnable Inc. is boosting its lineup of developer productivity tools with a service that provides developers with their own private staging servers, thereby attacking a chronic bottleneck in the development process.

Staging servers mimic the production environment in which an application operates, giving developers a way to test code prior to release. But staging servers are often in short supply, forcing developers to wait hours or days to check their work.

As a result, “Developers have a love-hate relationship with staging servers,” said Ken Olofsen (@kolofsen, left), a former Atlassian Corp. executive who recently joined Runnable as president and chief operating officer. “We believe that infrastructure should never get in the way of development speed.”

Runnable’s solution is to spin up unique staging server instances for each developer and project on Amazon Web Services LLC’s cloud that match the characteristics of the target runtime environment. The only requirements are that developers use GitHub and work in a Linux environment. It’s pricing the service in tiers at $9, $29 and $49 per developer per month, depending on complexity. There’s a temporary 25 percent discount through the end of September.

Upon launch, Runnable extracts from GitHub all the information necessary to set up the staging server in a container. Developers can optionally specify custom parameters and services. Each staging server is unique to the developer and only runs as long as needed. Runnable uses Docker containers by default. “If you’re not working in a container, we’ll essentially containerize the application,” Olofsen said. “As long as you point us to the code, we will spin up containers under each piece of code or each service and compose them all together.”

The service has been in private preview for about four months. “The big thing we’re seeing is that customers are increasing the cadence with which they’re releasing code, from weekly to daily or from daily to hourly,” Olofsen said. “DevOps teams love it because they know developers can get the environment they need.”

While the initial service is limited to AWS and Docker, Runnable expects to adopt other cloud platforms, Olofsen said.

Founded in 2013 by a former AWS software engineer, Runnable has raised more than $10 million toward its goal of changing the traditional development pipeline in favor of a more modern microservice and containerized approach. Its first product, called Code Snippets, enables developers to test code by running it in in a browser.

The company scored a bit of a coup recently by hiring Olofsen, who previously ran portfolio and customer marketing at Atlassian. Runnable simultaneously announced that Eric Wittman, formerly general manager for developer tools at Atlassian, has joined it board.