3 Parts of Ephemeral Problem

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2024-04-29 04:00:06

Following some recent conversations on the subject of ephemeral instances, it looks there exist various misconceptions. Some people are trying to build ephemeral infrastructure but do not necessarily realize what is involved.

This post aims to clarify three major problems that you should address when dealing with ephemeral instances. These problems are: Infrastructure, Code and Data. Below I will clarify the meaning of each and some available tools – including those we are working on at Reliza.

An ephemeral instance relies on a set of infrastructure resources to support it. Usually those resources are maintained as infrastructure-as-code using tf files. When spinning an ephemeral, the goal is to have its whole infrastructure operational via single tofu apply instruction. Refer to our Open Source REEF project as a sample tool supporting such approach.

When using Kubernetes, sometimes an ephemeral infrastructure could be simplified to spin a separate namespace in the same cluster. But even in this case we need consistent tooling to make the process seamless.