What is an ephemeral environment?

An ephemeral environment is a short-lived, isolated deployment of an application. Ephemeral environments provide robust, on-demand platforms for running tests, previewing features, and collaborating asynchronously across teams.

Marc Campbell profile picture

The only way I can confidently UAT a new feature for a complex application is with isolated ephemeral environments.

Waldemar Hummer profile picture

Ephemeral environments and local reproducibility of changes is an essential ingredient for team collaboration and an efficient dev&test feedback loop.

James Lindenbaum profile picture

If all of your environments, from local to production, aren't ephemeral, you are doing it wrong.

Peter Norton profile picture

Iterating on our infrastructure is a critical part to our application development. The best way to test those changes safely is by using ephemeral environments.

Jordan Patterson profile picture

Ephemeral environments are key in continuous delivery. Being able to test every code change in isolation is invaluable.

David Aronchick profile picture

When developing software, bugs are an eventuality. We use ephemeral environments to isolate their blast radius.

Dmitri Lerko profile picture

Ephemeral environments allowed us to keep increasing velocity without sacrificing quality. We've been doing it for 5 years now.

Sergey Buciuscan profile picture

Creating an on-demand isolated environment saves hours, or sometimes days, of waiting for the environment to be prepared and accelerates deployment.

Frankoe Botero profile picture

When we integrated ephemeral environments we saw a 10x velocity increase!

Neal Groothuis profile picture

Ephemeral environments allow me to develop and demo changes quickly and confidently.

Ephemeral Environments 101

These guides will walk you through the process of preparing your organization for ephemeral environments. They cover FAQs, useful features, and common challenges that come into play when getting started with environments.

Share environments across teams for a faster dev cycle

Read More

Keep your releases stable with a CI/CD pipeline and user testing

Read More

Best practices for keeping your environments safe and secure

Read More

Keep your product up-to-date with every new code change

Read More

Cut costs with environments that scale to your needs

Read More

Dodge blocks with environments that operate independently

Read More

Ephemeral environments and DORA

Ephemeral environments and DORA

How do ephemeral environments impact each of the four key DORA Metrics? Learn how and why ephemeral environments affect lead time, deployment frequency, change fail percentage, and failed deployment recovery time.

Read More     About DORA

About EphemeralEnvironments.io

This resource is for developers, product, and QA teams who build cloud products. This information is sourced from interviews with DevOps practitioners and members from large organizations who use ephemeral environments to optimize their workflow.

Who it’s for

EphemeralEnvironments.io is for organizations who want to begin using ephemeral environments, or who are at the early stages of implementation.

What it is

We offer a series of guides to assist your team with implementing ephemeral environments from the ground up, and any steps or features that may be involved.

Who we are

We're engineers at Shipyard, a company that helps you and your team use ephemeral environments. We build our product entirely using ephemeral environments and are big advocates for the productivity and convenience delivered by these automated staging environments.

Subscribe to the EphemeralEnvironments.io newsletter