For non-production workloads across the application lifecycle, using a static staging environment is inefficient. Typical issues stemming from idle cloud resources and environments include wasted spend, manual labor, configuration drift, human error, and security issues.
To cut down these unnecessary costs, remove bottlenecks, and expedite the application lifecycle, it’s time to turn to ephemeral environments.
Here we will provide a comprehensive definition of ephemeral environments, highlight their benefits and challenges, and provide best practices for implementing them efficiently and cost-effectively.
What are ephemeral environments and who uses them?
Also known as on-demand, dynamic, short-term, or sandbox environments, ephemeral environments are created and used only when needed. These temporary environments typically support cloud-native non-production workloads for staging, developing, testing, and demoing.
The short-lived nature of ephemeral environments is ideal for high-octane DevOps projects that often face cost overruns, overprovisioning scenarios, service redundancy, and resource wastage. This makes DevOps teams their primary end-users, although this is not their sole customer segment.
Platform engineering teams are responsible for delivering and managing ephemeral environments for development teams via internal developer platforms (IDPs).
The typical lifecycle of ephemeral environments, driven by collaboration between platform engineering and DevOps teams, includes the following steps:
- Understanding development requirements and use cases
- Provisioning the various components of ephemeral environments
- Orchestrating all their moving parts and dependencies
- Deploying ephemeral environments
- Assessing ephemeral environments to ensure that they are functioning as designed
- Decommissioning end-of-life ephemeral environments
Ephemeral environment use cases
To understand ephemeral environments better, let’s examine a couple of real-world scenarios in which they would be useful due to their short-lived, on-demand nature:
- Example scenario #1: DevOps teams only need to run development environments during working hours instead of leaving them running 24/7, which would result in unnecessary cloud consumption and costs during nights and weekends.
- Example scenario #2: Software vendors only need to run environments while conducting demos or training sessions during working hours.
So, how long do ephemeral environments last?
An ephemeral environment can run for the duration of an application delivery pipeline, which could range from a few days to a few weeks. However, the duration of ephemeral environments is highly variable and depends on the intricacies of the use case or project. It also depends on how and why DevOps teams want to optimize costs, time, and overall efficiency.
What are the benefits of ephemeral environments?
Let’s take a look at the many advantages of deploying ephemeral environments.
Optimized cloud costs
Using ephemeral environments ad hoc can greatly reduce the costs associated with idle cloud resources. According to Gartner, 69% of organizations face cloud budget overruns, making this a crucial benefit of ephemeral environments.
Improved cybersecurity
Once ephemeral environments have served their purpose, they are decommissioned, along with any entwined sensitive data and credentials. The alternative, i.e., dormant, redundant, and hidden cloud resources, are often hives of duplicated data, exploitable vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations.
Seamless provisioning
By embracing the ephemeral environments approach, platform engineering teams can more easily spin up environments on-demand and provision them via Infrastructure as Code automation mechanisms. This can result in measurable productivity gains for DevOps teams.
Streamlined testing and quality assurance (QA)
Ephemeral environments offer DevOps teams standardized, repeatable, and easy-to-use test instances to tackle myriad testing and QA processes. They expedite and improve the entire testing and QA lifecycle.
Tighter isolation
Ephemeral environments are individual and isolated instances, which means modifications in one instance won’t bleed into others. With this enhanced dependability, DevOps teams don’t have to worry about any implications their revisions may have on the rest of the development ecosystem.
Faster application development
Optimizing the delivery and management of non-production instances will accelerate CI/CD pipelines and the entire application development lifecycle. Mixing speed and efficiency, ephemeral environments help achieve DevOps’ high-level development velocity without wasting any resources.
Better resource utilization
Replacing static development environments with on-demand ephemeral environments means that DevOps processes don’t unnecessarily drain resources; this impacts everything from cloud service costs to engineer bandwidth. These benefits from the dynamic resource allocation of short-lived environments ensure that DevOps projects are lean, mean, and green.
Enhanced reproducibility
By codifying and automating the management of ephemeral environments, platform engineering teams can provide DevOps engineers with consistent and easily duplicable templates. This infrastructure-as-code approach means that platform engineering teams won’t have to manually reconstruct configuration settings every time they deploy new instances.
What are the challenges of ephemeral environments?
While it’s evident that ephemeral environments can enrich cloud-native development ecosystems, there are a few hurdles to overcome.
Identifying which environments can be ephemeral
Pinpointing which environments can be ephemeral is crucial yet challenging, as certain non-production instances simply can’t be short-term.
For example, some testing environments must be run alongside production environments. Additionally, full-time availability of some environments might be mandated by customer agreements to guarantee uptime.
Creating templates for environments
Making non-production environments ephemeral begins by defining those environments as code. While infrastructure as code is the best way to manage and automate ephemeral environments, it needs to account for existing environments and potential new environments down the road.
Automating the infrastructure lifecycle
Mitigating risks associated with ephemeral environments is vital. Manually managing them poses dangerous risks such as employee oversight and role ambiguity as a consequence of employee turnover.
The best way to counter such concerns is to eliminate any reliance on manual labor for shutting down and re-deploying instances. Automation is key.
Enforcing cloud governance with policies
Software teams need repeatable, compliant, and policy-driven methods of governing ephemeral environments. The challenge is to be strategic and preemptive because cloud costs will keep accruing until software teams discover and terminate idle environment runtimes.
Maintaining visibility into environment runtimes
Optimizing the management of ephemeral environments is impossible without complete visibility and the eradication of blind spots. This includes having a comprehensive view of when ephemeral environments were launched, when they were terminated, who launched them, and for what purpose.
Best practices for implementing ephemeral environments
The following are some important recommendations to help maximize ephemeral environments.
Embrace the environment-as-a-service approach
To make ephemeral environments work, it’s imperative to evolve from legacy models of environment delivery. An environment-as-a-service model enables consistent and repeatable provisioning via reusable templates that DevOps can update and configure as needed.
Automate the creation of reusable cloud assets
Adopting an environment-as-a-service approach that leverages reusable templates is one half of the puzzle. However, most teams don’t have the bandwidth to script ephemeral environments, so the next step involves automating the creation of templates.
Leveraging automation is ideal for creating new infrastructure-as-code modules from resources deployed via cloud accounts. Furthermore, introducing artificial intelligence tools can help orchestrate infrastructure-as-code and generate environment-as-code modules.
Automate the lifecycle of ephemeral environments
Automating every step of the ephemeral environment lifecycle is integral to making it a long-term and sustainable solution for DevOps environments. Doing so eliminates the risk of human error and cuts costs associated with idle cloud resources. The action items here include defining runtimes as code and using cron jobs to automate deployment and termination.
Create and enforce policies on maximum runtime
To ensure efficient resource utilization and prevent cost budget overruns, it’s crucial to enforce limits on runtimes for ephemeral environments. To actualize these limits, teams can use Terraform Rego files to define policies on maximum runtime.
Here as well AI can help create the code defining Open Policy Agent (OPA) standards to accelerate and simplify the creation of Terraform Rego files.
Remember to enforce these policies across every team to maintain a standardized culture around ephemeral environments.
Ensure strong security protocols for ephemeral environments
Securing ephemeral environments involves a combination of policies, tools, compliance guardrails, and best practices.
These environments contain sensitive data, so it’s important to establish data encryption and sanitization practices. Also, just like any other ecosystem, ephemeral environments are susceptible to vulnerabilities, making a vulnerability management program a must. Lastly, it’s vital to right-size entitlements and permissions and implement role-based access controls (RBAC).
Leverage a robust platform engineering tool
In theory, infrastructure as code alone is an optimal solution for non-production workloads. However, integrating access to run IaC across development environments requires a robust platform engineering tool that simplifies the provisioning experience, enforces your policies, and protects your cloud account credentials and other secrets.
With such a tool, platform engineering teams can package, manage, and automate ephemeral environments, and create golden paths for DevOps teams to access them.
Summary
Quali Torque users have successfully adopted ephemeral environments by making visibility, control, self-service portals, and automation a seamless part of the infrastructure lifecycle. The results include heightened developer productivity and massive cost savings, as showcased by one of Quali Torque’s most notable customers who saw their cloud expenses cut in half.
No matter what ephemeral environment requirements your DevOps team has, Quali Torque has you covered.
Interested in seeing how Quali Torque can transform DevOps with ephemeral environments? Start a free 30-day trial today.