Ephemeral Environments (EEs) can dramatically improve reliability: they help prevent issues from reaching production, reduce shared environment failures, and enable safer debugging when incidents happen. But what happens when we want to incorporate this strategy on complex architectures? At that point, interesting challenges start to appear: stateful systems and databases, long environment startup times, multiple dependent services, different use cases (PR validation vs release-level testing), and so on. In this talk, we’ll explore how EEs behave outside the happy path. We’ll look at real architectural trade-offs and patterns, including hybrid approaches where ephemeral services interact with controlled data layers. Rather than presenting a perfect solution, this session focuses on the decisions and compromises required to adopt EEs beyond simple use cases.
Marcos Novelli Harispe is a Fullstack Engineer and ORT University Lecturer focused on scalable AWS cloud systems. He specializes in event-driven architectures, Data Lakes, and infrastructure as code (Terraform), with extensive experience migrating production microservices to serverless. Equal parts hands-on engineer and educator, Marcos is passionate about reliability, observability, and mentoring the next generation of tech talent.
