Environments On Demand

Ephemeral environments, when set up the right way, function independently of your infrastructure team or any one person in charge. They prevent blocks by allowing your teams to collaborate asynchronously.

Break Things, Don’t Block Things

• ephemeral environments are intrinsically isolated environments
• by keeping your environments isolated, they can run independently of each other
• decoupling your dependencies will prevent your environments from breaking other environments
• isolated environments allow each member to test features independently without worrying about blocking other team members if anything goes awry

Asynchronous Collaboration

• for developer teams, ephemeral environments should be created and updated with every new code commit
• once the code is pushed, another developer can perform a code review on the active environment at their own convenience
• since ephemeral environments are on demand, nobody needs to set anything up with the environment between these two stages
• this applies to other teams as well – for example, Product and QA will also be able to instantly access the environments without scheduling or coordinating with other teams

Automating Your Environments

• in order to have ephemeral environments ready when needed, your SRE or DevOps team should automate the process
• by having automated environments, your developers won’t need to ping anyone in order to deploy any code changes
• this way, environments are ready right when your teams need them, so the pipeline does not slow down and each team member can work independently

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