Ephemeral environments are quickly becoming essential for fast-moving engineering teams. These short-lived, automated environments allow developers to test, preview, and validate changes in isolation without waiting on staging or managing manual infrastructure.

If you’re exploring how to bring ephemeral environments to your organization, this guide is for you. We’ll cover what they are, why they’re useful, and most importantly, how you can implement them effectively based on your infrastructure, team structure, and goals.

What Are Ephemeral Environments?

Ephemeral environments are temporary, fully provisioned environments that exist only as long as they’re needed. They are commonly used for testing code, previewing features, or validating infrastructure changes. These environments are typically created in response to a pull request or branch event and are automatically destroyed once the task is complete.

Unlike long-lived staging environments, ephemeral environments are purpose-built, on demand, and isolated from other work. Each one is spun up with fresh infrastructure, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of drift or cross-contamination.

Why DevOps Teams Are Turning to Ephemeral Environments

For teams that practice continuous integration and trunk-based development, the need for isolated, production-like environments has never been higher. Ephemeral environments solve multiple pain points at once. They eliminate delays caused by shared staging, help prevent configuration drift, reduce cloud waste, and allow engineers to move independently without constant coordination.

They also strengthen release processes. Teams can catch bugs earlier, preview changes in real-world conditions, and avoid costly mistakes that result from misaligned environments.

Ephemeral vs Dedicated Environments

While most engineering teams are familiar with traditional staging or QA environments, ephemeral environments offer a new approach that solves many common problems with dedicated setups.

Dedicated environments are typically shared, long-lived, and maintained manually or semi-manually. They often become bottlenecks when multiple teams need to share the same space. Over time, these environments tend to drift from production, making it harder to trust test results. Because they are persistent, they require constant maintenance, even when not in active use.

Ephemeral environments are temporary, purpose-built, and automatically created based on a specific context, such as a pull request. Each environment is built fresh from your infrastructure code, which ensures consistency and reduces the chance of hidden configuration issues. When the work is done, the environment is automatically torn down, eliminating waste and reducing overhead.

This shift from static environments to dynamic ones reflects a larger trend toward automation and scale. Rather than trying to make one staging environment serve everyone, teams automatically create environments as needed. This supports faster iteration, stronger isolation, and lower operational cost.

Real-World Use Cases

Ephemeral environments can support a variety of use cases across teams. For example, a developer working on a new feature can automatically trigger an environment from a pull request and share the live preview with their reviewer. A QA engineer testing a critical bug fix can validate it in a clean environment seeded with test data. Platform or SRE teams can spin up isolated infra environments to test Terraform modules or Helm charts. Some teams even use them for sales demos, provisioning branded, disposable versions of their app for every prospect.

These environments help reduce context-switching, speed up delivery, and bring more confidence to every stage of the development lifecycle.

How to Get Ephemeral Environments Up and Running

There are three main ways teams implement ephemeral environments. Each comes with trade-offs in complexity, flexibility, and operational overhead, and each requires a different level of setup and maintenance.

Build It Yourself with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD

The most flexible option is to build your own solution using infrastructure as code and your CI/CD tooling. Teams typically use tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Helm to define environments, and orchestrate them using pipelines in GitHub Actions, GitLab, or CircleCI.

To make this work, your services should be containerized or otherwise automatable. Your infrastructure must be defined in code to ensure consistency, and your CI/CD system needs to respond to git activity such as pull requests or branch creation. You will need logic to provision and connect multiple services, inject secrets or test data, and configure teardown to avoid leaving idle resources behind.

This approach gives you complete control over your environments, but it also means managing the glue code, access controls, cost enforcement, and security policies yourself. Many teams find that the time spent maintaining these workflows can grow quickly as the number of services and contributors scales.

Use Built-In Features from Dev Platforms

If you are working with simpler stacks or primarily frontend projects, developer platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Render offer ephemeral environments out of the box. In these systems, a pull request triggers a live preview environment without much setup. You configure your build process, connect your repo, and the platform handles provisioning and teardown behind the scenes.

This path is the easiest to adopt, especially for single-service or monolithic applications. However, it has limits. These tools often cannot support complex environments with backend services, databases, or infrastructure that must run inside your own cloud. If you need more flexibility or deeper integration with your internal systems, these platforms may not be enough.

Setup is minimal in this case, but you are bound by what the platform supports. Your team may not need to manage infrastructure directly, but you also do not get full control over how environments are provisioned or where they run.

Use a Platform Tool Designed for Multi-Service Infrastructure

The third option is to use a purpose-built internal platform like Tempest. This approach combines the flexibility of building it yourself with the ease of a managed solution. Tempest is designed to support ephemeral environments across microservices, infrastructure stacks, and hybrid or multi-cloud systems.

With Tempest, platform teams define reusable recipes that describe what environments for a given application should contain. These recipes can include infrastructure, services, and guardrails. Developers can stand up any dedicated production-like environment, or trigger environments automatically from pull requests or branch creation, without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure.

To get started, all you need to define are the configurations associated with each resource in a recipe. When a developer decides to self-service their application, Tempest handles orchestration, lifecycle management, and teardown policies for you. These environments run inside your own cloud accounts, making it easy to offer flexible, one-click ephemeral (and non-ephemeral) environment provisioning while you stay in control of costs, security, and compliance.

This option is ideal for teams that want to move quickly without taking on the complexity of managing every piece themselves. It works well across a wide range of use cases, from app development and QA to infrastructure testing and live previews.

Want Ephemeral Environments for Your Organization?

Ephemeral environments are no longer a nice-to-have. They’re becoming a core part of how modern engineering teams ship faster, test more reliably, and reduce operational overhead. Whether you choose to build your own, piece together existing tools, or adopt a purpose-built platform like Tempest, the payoff is clear: cleaner workflows, faster feedback, and better developer experience.

If you're exploring how to roll out ephemeral environments in your organization, we’d love to show you how Tempest can help. Learn how to set up an ephemeral environment in Tempest after signing up, book a demo for a custom walk through to see it in action.