Explore the benefits and use cases of ephemeral environments in cloud infrastructure. Learn how to optimize development workflows and streamline testing with temporary infrastructure.
We can all agree that managing dynamic cloud infrastructure can be complex and time-consuming.
Utilizing ephemeral environments in the cloud offers a solution by providing temporary infrastructure that meets the needs of development teams and workloads, then disappears when no longer required.
In this article, we will define ephemeral environments, explore their benefits, look at implementations across major cloud providers, review use cases showing how teams leverage ephemeral resources for testing and staging, and provide best practices to optimize these environments while ensuring governance.
Ephemeral environments are temporary infrastructure environments used for development, testing, and deployment workflows. They provide many benefits over long-lived environments in terms of cost, efficiency, and security.
Ephemeral environments are created on-demand when needed and automatically deprovisioned when no longer in use. Key characteristics include:
Compared to persistent QA or staging servers, ephemeral envs provide more flexibility and scale.
Ephemeral environments integrate into CI/CD pipelines and developer workflows:
This facilitates rapid iteration without disrupting existing long-lived resources.
Key advantages of ephemeral environments:
Overall, ephemeral environments streamline infrastructure workflows in cloud-based development.
An ephemeral environment is a temporary software development environment that exists only for a limited period of time.
Ephemeral environments are created on-demand when needed and automatically deleted when no longer required. They provide developers a clean, isolated space to build, test and experiment with application code without impacting longer-living environments.
Some key characteristics of ephemeral environments:
Ephemeral environments empower developers to freely build, iterate and collaborate without worrying about lasting effects. They bring velocity and freedom to the development process.
Platform teams use ephemeral environments to streamline internal workflows. For example, spinning up disposable environments for pull request validation, exploratory testing, experimentation, and more.
Ephemeral environments provide a number of key benefits:
Once an ephemeral environment has served its purpose, it can be deleted without leaving behind any artifacts that could cause issues down the road. This prevents resource conflicts from piling up over time.
Ephemeral environments only use resources when spun up for active development or testing. When deleted, you stop paying for those resources, keeping costs low.
Ephemeral environments can be rapidly spun up on demand when needed and torn down just as quickly. This improves developer productivity by removing wait times.
Data and credentials aren't persisted when an ephemeral environment is deleted. This reduces security risks from abandoned infrastructure containing sensitive data.
Overall, ephemeral environments empower teams to provision infrastructure quickly, use it temporarily, and delete it securely without worrying about lingering effects over time. The disposable nature keeps the focus on building products rather than managing cloud resources.
Ephemeral environments are temporary replicas of production or staging environments used for testing before deploying to the main environment. They provide several key benefits:
Ephemeral environments can spin up quickly, allowing tests to start faster without waiting for infrastructure changes. This enables rapid iterations.
Since ephemeral environments exist only as needed, they avoid overhead from maintaining permanent non-production environments. Their temporary nature makes them cost-efficient.
Changes can be validated in an identical environment first without impacting the main production or staging environments. This isolation reduces risk from changes.
The on-demand nature of ephemeral environments allows flexible scaling up and down to meet temporary capacity needs during testing.
Ultimately, ephemeral environments facilitate agile development by empowering teams to reliably test changes first. Their temporary existence provides flexibility without excess overhead.
Ephemeral environments are temporary application deployments designed to improve developer workflows. They provide developers with on-demand sandbox environments to test features or changes without impacting permanent infrastructure.
Here are some key things to know about ephemeral environments:
Ephemeral sites are flexible and disposable. They can be created on-demand for new branches, pull requests, or experiments. Once the task is complete, the environment can be easily deleted without leftover resources.
The ephemeral site and all its dependencies can be automatically provisioned based on configuration. This saves time compared to manually configuring test environments.
Each ephemeral environment runs in an isolated container or namespace separate from other environments and production. This allows testing changes safely without risk of impact.
Ephemeral sites utilize compute resources only when active. When deleted, you no longer pay for those resources. This optimized model lowers infrastructure costs.
By providing automated ephemeral testing environments, developers can try ideas and innovations faster. This leads to more experimentation, faster feedback, and ultimately more productivity.
In summary, ephemeral sites give developers flexible and isolated environments to validate changes more efficiently. Leveraging ephemeral infrastructure improves developer experience and accelerates delivery of innovation.
Ephemeral environments refer to temporarily provisioned infrastructure that exists only for as long as it is needed. Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer capabilities to automate the creation and teardown of these ephemeral environments.
AWS provides several services that can be used to build ephemeral environments:
Example use cases:
Key benefits include controlling costs and optimizing infrastructure usage.
Azure offers comparable capabilities for ephemeral workloads:
Use cases:
Ephemeral architecture reduces overhead and manages fluctuating demands.
Kubernetes facilitates container-based ephemeral environments:
Applications include:
Kubernetes enables organizations to maximize flexibility and optimize costs.
Ephemeral environments provide a flexible and efficient way to provision infrastructure on-demand. As their name implies, ephemeral environments are temporary—they can be created, used, and automatically destroyed as needed. This makes them well-suited for a variety of short-term use cases within the development lifecycle.
Ephemeral testing environments are immensely valuable for quality assurance and validation. They allow testers to spin up identical clones of the production stack when needed. Key benefits include:
Incorporating ephemeral environments into CI/CD pipelines unlocks many advantages:
Overall, ephemeral envs maximize the velocity, efficiency and stability of modern CI/CD workflows.
Ephemeral staging environments allow teams to instantly replicate production infrastructure on-demand for release testing and final validation. Key advantages include:
In summary, ephemeral environments streamline infrastructure provisioning to enhance testing, CI/CD, staging and more within the development lifecycle. Their temporary nature makes them a versatile primitive for optimizing cloud-based development.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform provide a powerful way to automate the orchestration of ephemeral environments in the cloud. By codifying infrastructure into declarative configuration files, IaC enables developers to spin up and tear down environments on-demand.
Terraform is purpose-built for provisioning infrastructure dynamically. Its state management and idempotent apply process lend themselves naturally to creating ephemeral architecture:
terraform destroy. For longer-term instances, remote state in S3 can retain history.terraform apply handles incremental changes without destroying resources. You can freely create, update, and destroy resources as needed.For example, to orchestrate ephemeral testing setups, you could utilize Terraform to deploy fresh dev/QA stacks nightly. These tear themselves down automatically the next day, minimizing waste.
To scale ephemeral infrastructure, it's important to automate provisioning flows. Options include:
Combining these approaches lets you trigger fresh infra creation for every code change or on a routine basis.
When utilizing IaC for ephemeral architecture, follow these guidelines:
Adhering to IaC best practices will streamline your ability to safely create and destroy cloud resources on-demand via code.
Ephemeral environments provide many benefits for real-world applications across various industries. Here are some examples of how companies have utilized ephemeral infrastructure to meet their business needs.
An online retailer needed to test how their e-commerce platform would perform under Black Friday traffic. By spinning up an exact copy of their production environment as an ephemeral environment, they could run intensive load tests to identify performance bottlenecks without impacting their live site. Once testing was complete, the ephemeral environment could be easily torn down.
Key benefits:
A major media site uses ephemeral environments to flawlessly live stream high-profile events with massive concurrent viewership. By dynamically provisioning resources like computing power and bandwidth only during the event lifespan, they can ensure a smooth streaming experience for customers without overprovisioning infrastructure year-round for short-term usage spikes.
Benefits:
A startup focused on rapid prototyping and testing of new app features leverages ephemeral dev environments that can be quickly spun up as needed by developers, then disposed of once the work is done. By standardizing environment configurations and automating provisioning and teardown, they accelerate development velocity.
Advantages:
In summary, ephemeral architecture unlocks flexibility and optimization potential across industries like e-commerce, media, and software development. The temporary and dynamic nature of these environments can benefit workload testing, traffic spike handling, cloud cost reduction, and accelerating software delivery.
Ephemeral environments provide many benefits, but must be properly managed to maximize efficiency. Here are some best practices:
Using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform or CloudFormation allows you to define ephemeral infrastructure in code. This makes orchestration and destruction automated and repeatable. Other tools like Ansible, Kubernetes, and AWS CDK can further enhance environment management.
To track costs, enable detailed AWS Cost Explorer reports or use third-party tools. Destroy unused resources rapidly to minimize unnecessary spend. Schedule pipelines using Cron jobs or similar tools to manage environment lifecycles.
Spot instances can reduce EC2 costs significantly. Auto Scaling Groups with Spot Fleet can replace instances if prices fluctuate.
Shutdown schedules for non-production infrastructure saves money by only running environments when needed.
Analyze usage data to right-size instance types. Use AWS Savings Plans for workloads with predictable usage.
Use IAM roles and policies to grant least privilege access. Monitor API calls with AWS CloudTrail.
Encrypt sensitive data at rest and in transit. Manage access with security groups and NACLs.
Log activity for auditing and embed compliance checks in CI/CD pipelines. Schedule recurring security assessments.
With proper precautions, ephemeral infrastructure can comply with regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS.
Ephemeral environments provide a strategic advantage for cloud platforms by enabling efficient resource utilization and streamlined development workflows. As highlighted throughout this article, some of the key benefits they offer include:
As cloud adoption continues growing exponentially, ephemeral environments will likely play an increasingly essential role in optimizing infrastructure utilization while meeting business demands for agility. We anticipate further innovation in areas like:
By embedding ephemeral principles deeper into cloud platforms, businesses can reap the benefits of elasticity, efficiency and developer productivity.
