The article examines the distinctions between conventional persistent staging environments and contemporary ephemeral environments for software testing. It highlights the issues associated with shared persistent environments, such as infrastructure overhead, queueing delays, and the risk of significant changes. On the other hand, ephemeral environments offer automated setup, isolation, and effortless creation and deletion. The article also provides guidelines for setting up ephemeral environments independently or utilizing an environment-as-a-service solution to streamline the process.

The Drawbacks of Traditional Environments

Ideally, code changes should be tested in a production-like environment before going live. However, using traditional persistent staging environments poses several practical challenges.

Infrastructure Overhead

The staging environment must replicate all production infrastructure components, such as frontends, backends, and databases. This requires extra effort to maintain and synchronize infrastructure changes across both environments. Staging can easily diverge from production if changes are forgotten or not perfectly mirrored.

Queueing Delays

With only one staging environment, developers must wait their turn to deploy changes. This reduces release velocity and productivity. Some developers may resort to risky workarounds to release faster, leading to problems from untested changes.

Risk of "Big Bang" Changes

If changes are not regularly deployed from staging to production, staging can get significantly ahead. Deploying to production then involves multiple commits at once, increasing the risk of breaking something.

These challenges highlight why traditional environments often fail to ensure safe testing as intended. Modern ephemeral environments offer a better solution.

The Benefits of Ephemeral Environments

Ephemeral environments provide several significant advantages over traditional persistent staging environments.

Automated Infrastructure

Ephemeral environments are created on-demand, automatically setting up the necessary infrastructure to match the current production setup. This ensures consistency without requiring manual intervention from engineers. Any broken environments can be swiftly replaced.

Complete Isolation

Each pull request receives its own newly created environment running in parallel. This eliminates queueing delays and allows testing without interference from other changes. There are no risky "big bang" deployments to production.

Short Life Span

Ephemeral environments exist only as long as needed. They can be configured to be created when a pull request opens and destroyed when it merges. This eliminates the cost of maintaining unused environments, leading to substantial cost savings.

These benefits enable developers to test safely and release quickly, addressing the common issues of traditional setups.

Implementing Ephemeral Environments

Setting up ephemeral environments requires some initial effort, but the benefits are substantial.

Prerequisites

Some essential infrastructure components should already be in place:

• Containerized service instances (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) for easy setup and teardown
• A CI/CD pipeline for managing deployment and code integration

Configuration Steps

The main steps to implement ephemeral environments include:

1. Set Up Production Infrastructure Declaratively

   • Define your production infrastructure using a declarative approach to ensure consistency.

2. Create a Test Database with Sample Data

   • Set up a test database that includes sample data to facilitate accurate testing.

3. Add Declarative Infrastructure with Dynamic Naming

   • Implement infrastructure that dynamically names resources based on branches or commits.

4. Trigger Deployment in the CI/CD Pipeline

   • Ensure your CI/CD pipeline can deploy the full stack automatically.

5. Generate Secure URLs for Access

   • Create secure URLs to access the deployed instances for testing purposes.

6. Replace Old Environments with New Ones

   • Automatically replace outdated environments with new ones when code updates are made.

7. Configure Auto-Removal After Inactivity

   • Set up auto-removal of environments after periods of inactivity to manage resources efficiently.

8. Prevent Direct Deployment to Production

   • Ensure the pipeline does not deploy directly to production. Implement a manual trigger for production deployment.

These steps streamline the workflow, but fully automating ephemeral environments does require a significant initial effort.

Conclusion

In summary, ephemeral environments offer modern solutions to the persistent challenges associated with traditional staging environments. By automating the provisioning and teardown of isolated environments on demand, they facilitate rapid and safe iteration without the delays and overhead typical of traditional setups.

Implementing ephemeral environments requires an upfront investment in adopting declarative infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization. However, the long-term productivity and stability benefits make this investment worthwhile for most development teams.