Scaling Quality: The Industry’s Shift Towards Ephemeral Environments in 2024

Originally posted on Signadot's blog, by Gunjan Bhatnagar.

Ephemeral environments enable rapid, on-demand testing for microservices, improving collaboration, efficiency, and software quality while reducing costs.

Introduction

Imagine this: every time your team submits a new feature, a fully functional testing environment is deployed in seconds, disappearing just as swiftly once it is no longer needed. No resource wastage, no delays—just pure, streamlined efficiency. In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, this is no longer a dream but a reality, thanks to ephemeral environments. These temporary setups are transforming how high-velocity engineering teams manage and test projects, offering unprecedented flexibility and speed.

Ephemeral environments have revolutionized the management of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), especially for Microservices Testing at Enterprise scale. High-velocity teams now can generate on-demand environments for every pull request, real-time reviews, and automated testing without the need to duplicate resources. It means that teams can quickly spin up isolated environments, collaborate seamlessly, and test new features before they are merged into the main code.

As organizations increasingly prioritize software quality, many are adopting ephemeral environments to streamline development and testing processes, ensuring faster, more efficient workflows.

According to Baseline’s recent study, 40% of respondents are already using ephemeral environments, with another 12% prioritizing their adoption in 2023 (Baseline).To acknowledge the transformative impact of the ephemeral environment on modern software development, it is essential to explore the key aspects and value drivers that distinguish them. From rapid setup to enhanced testing and collaboration, these environments are redefining efficiency for high-velocity teams.

Key aspects

1. On-demand environments:

Ephemeral environments are lightweight, quick to spin up and ready for testing within seconds. These provide isolated settings for executing test cases, minimizing the risk of cross-environment issues.

• Testing in Isolation: Allows independent testing of features, preventing interference from other environments.
• Increased Efficiency: Ensures environments are available on demand, streamlining workflows and enhancing the development cycle.
• Overhead costs minimized: Reduces operational burden and infrastructure costs through automation and infrastructure-as-code. The survey by Gartner’s 2024 DevOps trends Forecast states that number of organizations using ephemeral environments increase manyfold due to its cost efficiency and expandability.

2. Comprehensive testing platform for microservices:

An extensive testing platform customized for microservices architectures simplifies testing processes and addresses unique challenges faced by this architecture.

• Integration of tools: Integration of automated and manual testing tools enhances team efficiency as it provides a unified interface for varied testing activities.
• All microservices are verified by using various testing approaches like unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
• By focusing on the interactions between microservices, the platform identifies issues related to service dependencies and interactions, making sure that the entire system operates together as intended.

‍3. Unified shared staging environment for safe testing:

• Shareable clusters: By using shareable clusters, multiple teams can run tests in the same environment without interfering with one another. According to Baseline’s poll, 32% of participants cited overcoming obstacles in shared spaces as their main benefit (Baseline).
• Scalability: These environments allow large teams and complex microservices architectures to meet the rising demands of development while maintaining performance.
• Isolated testing: It allows developers to test their code independently, reducing conflicts and preventing interference with other teams.
• Realistic testing: These environments closely simulate the production setup, ensuring test results are correct. The survey by GitLab’s Global DevSecOps shows that many DevSecOps are moving to these on-demand environments addressing the challenges of “environment drift” which can arise when testing and production environments differ.
• Cost-efficiency: These environments remove the need for multiple permanent environments. Because of this, resource consumption and associated costs are reduced.
• Early detection of issues: Issues identified at individual stages help improve software product quality.
• Maximization of resource efficiency: This approach allows teams to use resources more effectively while maintaining high testing standards.

4. Enhanced collaboration:

• Streamlined workflows: Ephemeral environments enhance collaboration across various teams, by streamlining workflows and reducing barriers to communication between developers, product, and QA teams. In 2023, 12% of companies that are surveyed planned to deploy ephemeral environments, highlighting the importance in the development (Baseline). This trend focuses on how these environments are transforming software testing by enhancing collaboration, speed, and overall code quality.
• Asynchronous code review: Developers can share remote links to ephemeral environments enabling asynchronous code review and faster feedback cycles.
• Product team: Product teams can review and give feedback on new features
• QA assessment: QA teams can run tests in parallel that allows to identify issues earlier, improving efficiency in the testing process.
• Enhanced Communication: Increased visibility of testing scenarios and features leads to better communication and collaboration among team members, ultimately aligning objectives and expectations.

‍5. Enhances testing efficiency:

• Rapid environment creation: By facilitating quick setup of isolated environments, Ephemeral environments enhance the efficiency of both automated and manual tests in application development.
• Automated testing: Ephemeral environments allow for automatic tests with every pull request saving time and speeding up the development process.
• CI/CD pipelines: Ephemeral environments support early and continuous testing within CI/CD pipelines, allowing teams to fix bugs in the initial stages before it goes to production.
• Quality Assurance (QA) teams benefit from parallel testing environments, enabling QA to identify bugs, developers, and testers to provide feedback before new features go to production.
• Early Feedback Loops: The setup enables developers and testers to provide timely feedback on new features, fostering collaborative refinement before deployment to production. Survey findings show that 21% of respondents highlighted faster iterations and feedback loops as key benefits (Baseline). By removing the need for duplicate environments, teams can focus on delivering high-quality outcomes with optimal resource utilization.
• Streamlined Release Process: By facilitating efficient testing, ephemeral environments contribute to a more streamlined release process, enhancing overall software quality and reducing time to market.

6. Streamlines the workflow:

• Agility in Adaptation: Streamlined workflows empower teams to quickly adapt to changes while upholding high-quality standards throughout the development process.
• Automated Workspace Setup: Ephemeral environments facilitate the rapid and consistent establishment of developer workspaces, minimizing setup time.
• Version Control and Collaboration: Developers can make code changes, organize commits, and open pull requests for peer review, enhancing collaboration and code quality.
• By automating testing and code reviews Ephemeral environments facilitate the identification and rectification of errors in initial stages of the development cycle.
• Quality Assurance in Isolation: QA teams can validate that features meet specifications within isolated environments, ensuring thorough testing without interference from other development activities.
• Lifecycle Management: After successful mergers, ephemeral environments are dismantled, optimizing resource usage and maintaining a clean workspace.

7. Cost Control

• Dynamic Resource Allocation: Cloud resources are dynamically allocated enabling cost efficiency and reducing infrastructure expenses associated with redundant setups.
• Scalable: By spinning up environments in seconds and dismantling based on demand prevents resource bottlenecks ensuring optimal performance during peak testing periods.
• Operational Efficiency: Rapid creation and teardown of ephemeral environments optimizes operational efficiency by minimizing idle resource time.
• Automated Cleanup: Automated cleanup by ephemeral environments lessens unnecessary costs and avoids resource wastage.
• Intelligent Shutdown: Cloud expenses will be reduced by automating the shutdown of environments when they are not in use. This flexibility allows organizations to manage costs.

‍8. Security risks:

Ephemeral environments can pose security risks if not properly protected. To safeguard these environments:

• Role based access Control: Restrict access using role-based permissions, Single Sign-On (SSO), or VPNs to limit access to authorized users and ensure secure logins.
• Sanitize data by avoiding the use of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and employing separate security keys from production, environment variables, and automatic key rotation.

The Puppet’s 2024 State of DevOps Report shows that evolution of platform engineering has become a major contributor in enhancing security, efficiency, and developer productivity within DevOps. It also emphasizes how platform engineering became central to delivering security, with 43% of respondents having dedicated security and compliance teams. Standardized processes and Automation are major benefits, enabling 66% of platform teams to streamline workflows effectively, and this directly ties into the use of ephemeral environments for quicker development and testing cycles (Perforce) (DevPro Journal) (Puppet).

9. 10x improvement in testing speed:

• Accelerated Testing Cycles: Ephemeral environments allow technical teams to attain 10x increase in testing speed, remarkably reducing the time for test execution.
• Rapid Feedback Loops: The ability to rapidly spin up isolated environments simplifies immediate feedback on code changes, lets teams address issues as they surface.
• Enhanced Iteration: Fast testing cycles help a more iterative development process, allowing teams to apply changes and validate features swiftly.
• Streamlined Release Cycles: Combination of both, rapid testing and feedback leads to faster release cycles, allowing organizations to roll out updates and new features more efficiently.
• Enhanced Quality Assurance: Accelerated testing enables more thorough testing scenarios, resulting in improved software quality and fewer production issues.

The Qovery’s 2023 State of Preview Environments Report shows that 43% of software teams are currently using preview environments, and 18% plan to adopt them soon. In the survey, around 70% of software engineers view preview environments as important (45%) or extremely important (25%) for their development processes. Key benefits include shorter feedback cycles, increased development speed, and fewer bugs (Qovery).

Value Drivers

1. Testing in Isolation: Multiple developers test their code simultaneously without causing conflicts with isolated environments. Tests run in isolated environments prevent interference ensuring accurate results.

2. Removes Staging/QA bottlenecks: Delays associated with traditional staging and QA environments are eliminated by testing in ephemeral environments. This removes the need for long waits to access shared environments helping developers test code changes without waiting for environment availability.

3. Early Feedback: Developers identify and address problems as testing occurs early in the development process before they escalate accelerating the development cycle and improve code quality.

4. Improved Collaboration: Developers, QA engineers, and product managers work together more effectively by sharing test results and feedback, which improves project quality.

5. Indirectly supports Agile/Scrum methodologies: Ephemeral environments facilitate continuous improvement by enabling rapid testing and feedback aligning with the Agile principles of delivering incremental value.

6. Control Costs: With Shareable clusters and automated ephemeral environments, unnecessary expenses can be cut down such as avoiding the need for duplicate testing environments and reducing infrastructure overhead.

7. Parallel testing: Teams can run multiple tests in parallel during development allowing for simultaneous validation of unique features or bug fixes, speeding up the overall testing process.

8. Scalable: On-demand environments are easily scalable and can accommodate large teams and complex microservices architectures, ensuring resources are available as and when needed.

9. Flexible: Ephemeral environments can quickly spin up and dismantled that are tailored to specific testing needs, providing flexibility for teams in various projects.

10. Improved resource utilization: Removal of environments are automated which helps maintain resource efficiency and ensures that costs are kept in check.

11. Faster release cycles and reduced risk of production: Enables rapid testing and feedback contributing to quicker release cycles while catching issues early and testing in isolation significantly lowering the likelihood of defects reaching production. This enhances overall application stability and allows teams to deliver features to market more efficiently.

Signadot

Signadot is a Kubernetes-native platform that enables shift-left testing for microservices-based applications. It allows continuous and automated testing early in SDLC process that supports pull request reviews and local previews.

Challenges faced by DoorDash:

DoorDash, a technology company that builds products and services faced challenges like

• Lengthy deployment times.
• Inadequate testing approaches.
• Unreliable staging environment and
• Inconsistency between staging and production environments.

How Signadot helped DoorDash:

• Real-time testing directly from their laptops.
• Fast previewing.
• Used Connect feature, for seamless microservices testing.
• Time saving and increased testing iterations.

Challenges faced by Brex

Brex, a financial services technology company faced problems like

• Unmaintained preview environments.
• Duplicated dev environments created reliability problems.
• Unreliable previews.

How Signadot helped Brex:

• Isolated sandboxes within shared cluster.
• Able to run both unit tests and integrations test as part of inner loop.
• Quality of data.
• Cost and velocity advantages, user satisfaction.

Deployment and Creation

Signadot integrates with Kubernetes, creating multiple isolated sandboxes in the same cluster. These sandboxes are isolated by Kubernetes networking, Open Telemetry, and Service Mesh that allows for automated tests to validate changes at initial stages.

Conclusion

Signadot provides a transformative approach to application development by leveraging Ephemeral environments and a Comprehensive testing platform for microservices. It empowers teams to create isolated and on-demand environments integrating both manual and automated processes ensuring that microservices are tested before deployment. It supports shift-left testing that allows increase testing cycles, reduce resource consumption, ensure higher quality without affecting live systems.

At Signadot, we offer innovative solutions to optimize your deployment processes and microservices testing with Ephemeral environments and Comprehensive testing platform to maximize efficiency and quality in your software development. Connect with us today to see how we can enhance project quality with seamless deployment.

info@signadot.com