# 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 <mark style="color:orange;">`/env-create-for-mybrach <link>`</mark>


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