#EPHEMERAL ENVIRONMENTS REGISTRATION#

The biggest factor to consider here is cost: If each ephemeral environment costs 10% of production spend, and you have 30 open pull requests, you'll be quadrupling your monthly costs to run environments that are mostly unused.Īnother approach is to create a ChatOps bot that allows creating a new environment for a specific branch with a small timeout, but this requires waiting for the environment to be provisioned at the time that it's required.

When the merge request is first opened, an environment is provisioned, and when the merge request is closed, the environment is cleaned up. One of the hardest problems to solve when implementing Ephemeral Environments is considering when to create/destroy them.Ī classic approach is to tie the lifecycle to the life of a pull request or merge request.

Migrated - The database uses the schema currently used in production, and has proposed migrations run against it: One of the most common classes of problems uncovered by ephemeral environments are broken or non-performant database migrations.

#EPHEMERAL ENVIRONMENTS REGISTRATION#

This is also crucial for running destructive end-to-end tests that perform actions like registration and account deletion. Undoable - If, in the course of a review, data is deleted or modified, it should be easy to reset the database to its original state.Prepopulated - it contains representative, anonymized data - to pass security audits, all Personally-Identifiable Information (PII) must be scrubbed from databases used by ephemeral environments.In the early implementation of ephemeral environments, it might make sense to connect API servers with read-only permissions to a staging database (e.g., via IAM roles if using AWS) - however, the end goal should be to have a fresh copy of the database for every commit.Īn ideal ephemeral database has three attributes:

A reviewer should be able to try deleting a resource in a review without fear of affecting production. By their nature, ephemeral environments are temporary and should be isolated from production servers or data.

Ephemeral environments