Ephemeral Environments And Cost Control

In order for ephemeral environments to be a productive and worthwhile tool for your organization, they must not accumulate any unreasonable costs or consume excess resources. Using scalable ephemeral environments will keep your costs at bay, as computing resources will be allocated dynamically based on the load required. This way, your organization will only pay for the cloud resources that they use. Note: you will still need to clean up your environments.

Cloud Elasticity

• ephemeral environments are an elastic way for you to use the cloud for your organization
• you’re not forced to wait for resources to free up in order to access your environments
• because of virtualization, your environments can scale up and down, depending on how many resources they may require at any given moment

Resource Constraints

• when you’re not using the cloud in an elastic way, your team will run into roadblocks
• without cloud elasticity, teams will be waiting until computing resources free up before they can host their environments
• statically-allocated computing resources will incur unnecessary costs when underused, but limit performance on busier days

Ephemeral by Definition

• environments that are not ephemeral are difficult to turn on and off, owing to their dependent nature
• inherently, ephemeral environments are designed to be turned on and off frequently
• ephemeral environments are easily spun up and destroyed, which means they only need to last as long as your team may need them
• it is best practice to automatically turn environments off when no longer in use to reduce cloud costs
• if this process is automated, your DevOps team won’t need to intervene

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