Ephemeral Environments

Concept

Ephemeral environments are designed to be identical replicas of production environments (except in size) and can be created automatically only based on existing primary environments.

Sometimes Ephemeral Environments are also known as Preview Environments, Temporary Environments, Development Environments.

Ephemeral environments are usually environments that live during the life of a Pull Request or are created manually to preview changes, showcase demos, or test new configurations.

A really important thing to consider is that the ability to start from the same point allows for predictability in reproducing issues.

Another really important thing to consider is that when using Ephemeral Environments, a new way of working is unlocked: you can easily perform destructive changes on an Environment, then discard it, and it will not affect your main testing flow at all. This is especially useful when testing things like connectivity issues or check for resilience of apps.

Ephemerals in Bunnyshell

With Bunnyshell, you automatically create ephemeral environments very simply, with a pull request, with a pull request comment, or via API integration with your current CI/CD solution.

1. Select your environment in the Bunnyshell interface.

2. Click the Settings button. The settings for the selected environment are displayed.

3. In the Ephemeral environments section, toggle on the Create ephemeral environments on pull request option. This option is automatically saved by Bunnyshell.

4. Select the cluster where you ephemeral environment will be deployed by clicking the button located under Destination Kubernetes cluster and choosing an option from the drop-down menu.

You can also deploy your ephemeral environment in a separate cluster from the one where the primary environment is deployed.

Ephemeral environments will be automatically created only if the primary environment was already deployed successfully (its status is either Running or Stopped).

Ephemeral environments can later be converted to primary environments:

• Select the ephemeral environment in question.

• Click the Settings button.

• Click Convert to Primary.

You can define the triggers to create ephemeral environments at a specific primary environment level. The primary environment will be used as a blueprint for generating the ephemeral environment.

As these ephemeral environments are meant to be destroyed when they are no longer needed, you can also define the triggers to automatically destroy them.