We know Ephemeral Environments (EEs) reduce unexpected errors in production, but what happens when an issue inevitably slips through? In this follow-up to “Making Life Easier for SREs with EEs”, we shift our focus from prevention to the high-pressure world of incident response and post-mortems. This session explores how EEs can help us become faster firefighters and more effective investigators. We will walk through a live Kubernetes microservice demo to experience how EEs serve as a dual-purpose tool when facing real production failures: first, as a firefighting asset to quickly reproduce and mitigate production failures eliminating the “it only breaks in production” problem; and second, as a time machine to rebuild the exact configuration and code state that triggered the failure for deep debugging and root cause analysis leading to permanent fixes. We will also touch upon common concerns, including how to manage the cost and persistence of these temporary environments in a real-world SRE workflow.
Marcos Novelli Harispe is a software engineer specializing in AWS, serverless architectures, and data-driven solutions. He has delivered scalable notification systems, analytics platforms, and automation tools across freelance and full-time roles, with a focus on reliability, efficiency, and measurable business impact.
