Development teams and product managers have many variables that affect their daily processes, but perhaps the most impactful is the nature of their development environment. Having a proper development environment can fundamentally change the efficacy of an entire engineering team, unlocking incredible productivity and iterative development at scale.
Just like ensuring developers are equipped with the proper IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for creating great code, ephemeral environments are another piece of the development toolkit offering unprecedented value to developers and their teams. Today, we’ll look at ephemeral environments, how they benefit teams at scale, and how you can get started with them today!
What Are Ephemeral Environments?
Ephemeral environments are temporary environments used as infrastructure for development, testing, staging, and other non-production functions. While they replicate production-like conditions, they are generally not intended to be used as production environments. These environments are time-limited, but they are often also function-limited—because they’re designed to run for a short time with a specific purpose, they are often built specifically for that purpose and function.
Ephemeral environments are referred to by a long list of terms, including:
- Temporary isolated environments;
- Sandbox environments;
- On-demand environments;
- Dynamic environments.
Developers can use ephemeral environments to target specific functions or processes for testing, optimization, production alignment, and more. Since these environments are typically designed to replicate the production environment, they are helpful in developing new features, testing new configurations, or even iterating on product offerings. Combined with a solution like traffic replay, ephemeral environments can allow you to create hyper-realistic scenarios for developing and testing your application.
Ephemeral environments typically use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) providers, including Kubernetes and Docker. These tools allow for the rapid creation of environments, typically with a database attached, which can be automated and managed at scale.
How Do Ephemeral Environments Work?
Ephemeral environments utilize automated systems to provision and manage resources. These systems typically leverage a cloud provider to provision resources based on a pre-determined build guide, utilizing cloud resources and replicated data to create environments for specific purposes.
Once a system is defined, you can utilize a variety of technologies to build that system. A popular solution involves using containers managed by tools like Kubernetes and Docker. In this approach, each container holds the specific code and dependencies needed to run an isolated version of the environment. Orchestration tools like Kubernetes manage the lifecycle of these containers, handling creation, scaling, and destruction as needed without affecting the primary environment.
In essence, ephemeral systems are a bit like doing a “copy-paste” of your existing environment – except it is one that you can rapidly erase, scale, or alter at will.
It’s important to remember that if configured, containers can connect with systems, network structures, etc. A container functions according to your design, so you must be cautious when constructing it. While isolated containers are a huge benefit, allowing you to iterate without having any possible effect on the overall system, code base, or network, you can also use containers to spin up services that are connected when you need horizontal scaling for a particular function.
Why Do You Need Ephemeral Environments?
Developing anything requires a high level of control. The ability to create in an environment you understand is incredibly impactful, but getting to that understanding has often required deep introspection of your data sources, the network, the systems tied into both, and the very code being worked upon in extreme detail.
This ultimately results in a heavy burden on development teams to have a holistic view of every step of the process, environment, and system. When even a small part of this is missed, tack-on issues can arise (or persist), undermining the efficacy of the entire system.
Ephemeral systems sidestep this entirely by shifting the relationship between the developer and the environment. Instead of the developer having to learn what the environment is, the developer can now create and control that environment in its entirety, granting huge gains in understanding and efficiency at scale.
Advantages of Ephemeral Environments
Ephemeral environments provide some major functionality that is hard to achieve with other solutions. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of ephemeral environments.
Improved Testing
Ephemeral environments are extremely useful for testing, as they present an environment that is as close to the production environment as possible. This allows testing to align against realistic use cases, improving the development workflow and resulting in a development process that is closely aligned to actual traffic, user patterns, and interactions.
This can be especially useful when developing new feature sets or implementing new environment variables. The development cycle hinges on having an environment that is realistic – being able to have a temporary environment that is an exact replica of real-world conditions results in drastically improved testing outcomes.
This can also have long-term impacts on the software development lifecycle by shifting error detection and mitigation earlier. Instead of waiting for issues to arise in the production environment, an ephemeral environment can allow developers to create staging environment workflows that help resolve bugs, correct misconfigurations, and identify compatibility issues before the user is ever even aware that the issues exist. This can increase the quality of releases and, in many cases, can result in increased deployment frequency through the improvement of release quality and iterative velocity.
User Design and Iteration
Utilizing ephemeral environments allows you to iterate while previewing features, estimating operational costs, and running tests on new deployments. This allows for much more rapid development that is flexible and feedback heavy, negating the need for time consuming A-B manual testing or market interest estimates.
A huge benefit of this process is the fact that customer traffic and data sources can be segmented into different ephemeral environments, allowing for more extensive testing. More traditional A-B testing only allows you to test a set of possibilities – with ephemeral environment testing, you can test against the product as-is, a new version of the product, and new iterative developments, as well as the traffic as it is, projected traffic shifts, and completely different traffic patterns. You can test new code against a huge variety of potential environments and user realities, and you can do this extremely rapidly at a scale that isn’t possible with other solutions.
Design Isolation
Implementing this process naturally results in an isolated environment that is insulated from other changes, development processes, biases, and so forth. Ephemeral environments lend themselves to isolating specific functions and processes, allowing for testing on specific elements.
Want to test a specific feature branch? Maybe replicate a pull request that resulted in a strange failure in transit due to code changes? Isolated environments can do that efficiently with a high level of control.
This can also be very effective for helping development teams isolate their development before they’re ready to test in actual production environments. Staging environments that are not isolated bring with them a certain amount of risk, so fully isolating essentially removes that risk, allowing for development at a much higher level.
Improved Continuity and Developer Experience
Using ephemeral environments results in a better developer experience by establishing consistent and faster feedback loops. These loops allow for rapid testing and iteration with feedback built into the core product, allowing many teams to work on different iterations, even within instances of the same version of the core production environment.
In many cases, this can be used to build a continuous integration pipeline, where features are tested and committed to the main branch once the latest code is validated in a sequence of increasingly complex or limiting environments.
This also reduces much of the headaches behind collaborative and iterative development. Using ephemeral environments reduces the need to have a complex cleanup process or to synchronize processes such as GitHub actions. Everything is isolated, so changes don’t cascade, and with an effective management process, the ultimate output should be cleanly integrated.
Enhanced Security
Ephemeral environments are time-limited in nature, meaning that they disappear once their utility is utilized and the involved developers push code live. These systems are also very isolated from other systems – there’s often very little crossover or referencing between systems, and in many cases, the environments may not even be connected to servers at all except for integration testing and traffic replay.
For this reason, ephemeral environments boost security significantly. Developers can expose secrets or test security faults without fear of these efforts bleeding into the production service, especially when those threats are due to internal endpoints or other security issues that, if exposed, may risk the entire service.
While ephemeral environments reduce the risks associated with shadow IT, zombie APIs, and unmonitored secrets, proper management is essential to ensure that resources are fully de-provisioned when no longer in use, preventing residual risks associated with unmanaged environments. A new environment being spun up for each class or issue means there is a high level of isolation, and when destroyed, those exposures go away instantly.
Getting Started with Ephemeral Environments
While these specific purposes may change the overall structure of the ephemeral environment, many attributes are consistent between builds. Multiple environments often follow a similar structure to the production environment, replicating key elements to ensure that testing conditions are realistic. However, setup can vary depending on specific organizational needs, tools, and cloud provider capabilities.
Although this process can differ from organization to organization when it comes to how they implement ephemeral environments, most build processes cover the same general steps:
- Define the Infrastructure – at this stage, you should define the specific methodology and environment resulting from that methodology. Specifically, you should choose what IaC solution will manage your ephemeral environments. Kubernetes and Docker are common solutions in this space, though many others exist.
- Provisioning Design – next, you should design your on-demand provisioning structure and the stage in which this occurs. Best practice would have this aligned against the CI/CD pipeline, allowing developers to request an ephemeral environment throughout the software development lifecycle as-needed.
- Building the Environment – now that you have laid the ground work, you need to actually build the configuration and dependencies that will create your environment. This will be largely focused on ensuring that you are packaging the specific dependencies needed in order for the ephemeral environment to be portable and consistent.
- Automating Creation and Removal – now you have a deployable ephemeral environment! From here, you need to make sure you have the right configuration and system for automated creation and removal. This will allow you to spin up environments as needed. Since you typically won’t have many environments identical to one another, you will need to customize your triggers for removal to ensure that you don’t create shadow infrastructure.
Ephemeral Environments Examples
While the concept of ephemeral environments might seem abstract, they have very real and practical applications when used in developing and testing applications and services. Here are a few examples of how ephemeral environments can be used:
| Use Case | Description |
| Feature Branch Testing | Teams can create an isolated environment that mirrors the production environment to test new features thoroughly. This includes integration with databases and external services without affecting the live application or other developers’ work. Once testing is complete, the environment is torn down. |
| Troubleshooting and Bug Reproduction | Developers can recreate the exact conditions that led to a reported bug in production within an ephemeral environment. This allows for focused debugging and faster resolution without disrupting the live service. By loading production data and replaying user traffic, they can effectively pinpoint the root cause and test fixes with high accuracy and confidence. |
| A/B Testing and Experimentation | Ephemeral environments enable rapid A/B testing of different versions of a feature or application. Teams can deploy multiple variations to separate testing environments, route traffic to them, and analyze user behavior in a controlled setting. This facilitates data-driven decisions about which version performs best before rolling it out to the entire user base. |
| Security Vulnerability Assessment | Security teams can safely test for vulnerabilities in ephemeral environments. They can simulate attacks, analyze security configurations, and experiment with mitigation strategies without putting the production system at risk. This allows for proactive identification and resolution of security flaws. |
These examples illustrate how ephemeral environments can assist development teams in many scenarios. By providing on-demand, isolated replicas of the production environment, they help development teams to work more efficiently, reduce risks, and accelerate the software development lifecycle.
Support Ephemeral Environments with Speedscale
If you’re looking to create realistic environments for testing and development, Speedscale is a great tool for enhancing ephemeral environment functionality to meet this need. It supports testing in these environments by allowing developers to capture traffic and simulate real-world data flows. Speedscale’s tools can emulate different backends, scenarios, and user flows, enhancing testing in a controlled, production-like environment. This emulation can then be replayed across a variety of scenarios, testing new code, changes to processing order, and entire new environmental variables.
This approach has tremendous benefits compared to traditional environments. Firstly, the stakes are pretty low—by emulating using real data instead of imaging potential scenarios or doing it live in production, you isolate changes effectively, allowing for iterative testing and simulation without exposing your actual services or data to potential risks.
This also provides much better troubleshooting performance. Since you can rapidly A-B test issues, simulate real-world traffic across individual transactions and larger-scale user reports, and test specific user flows, you can figure out the root cause of issues much quicker.
Additionally, having your systems structured in this way allows you to have a much more detailed observability of the overall service. Speedscale offers atomic inbound and outbound transaction detection, allowing real-time views of dependencies. This results in more accurate ephemeral environments, a deeper understanding of your service overall, and greater clarity into your system and user interactions.
Conclusion
Ultimately, ephemeral environments are incredibly powerful, offering developers a tool for more rapid, accurate, and useful development. Whether they will be appropriate for your use case will depend largely on your development team’s structure and intent, but most organizations will find at least some aspect of this approach very helpful. In some cases, this can be a transformative technology, fully changing how you develop applications and services.
If you’d like to get started with ephemeral environments today, you can sign up for a free account with Speedscale. This will allow you access to the full suite of functions and tools for 30 days, allowing you to grasp the benefits of realistic ephemeral environments.