# Ephemeral Environments * Temporary deployments that have self-contained versions of your application, generally every feature branch ### How do databases work in ephemeral environments? * Prepopulated data - it contains representative, anonymized data - to pass security audits, all Personally-Identifiable Information must be scrubbed from databases to be used in such envs * Undoable - if data is deleted or modified, it should be easy to reset the database to its original state * Migrated - Database uses the schema currently used in PROD and has proposed migrations run against it * On of the most common cases of problems uncovered by ephemeral environments are broken or non-preformat database migrations ### Ephemeral environments lifecycle management: * Option A: tie the lifecycle to the life of a pull request or merge request * Option B: Create a ChatOps bot that allows creating a new environment for a specific branch with a small timeout * Option C: Create an ephemeral environment for every commit, and hibernate them the second they are provisioned, then wake them up as they are required ### DYI ephemeral environments: * Budget 6-12 months of engineering time for setup, then dedicated person for managing these envs * Will need clould service provider * Create slackbot that responds to `/env-create-for-mybrach `