Instead of a shared 'staging' environment that becomes a bottleneck, ephemeral environments allow developers to spin up a complete, isolated copy of the application for every single pull request.

Step 1 — Virtual Kubernetes Clusters

vcluster allows you to run virtual Kubernetes clusters inside a single host cluster. This is significantly cheaper and faster than provisioning a full EKS/GKE cluster per PR.

Terminalbash
# Create a new virtual cluster for PR #123
vcluster create pr-123 -n host-namespace

# Connect to the vcluster
vcluster connect pr-123

# Deploy application to the isolated vcluster
helm install my-app ./chart

Step 2 — CI/CD Integration

Integrate environment creation into GitHub Actions. When a PR is opened, the environment is spun up. When closed or merged, the environment is automatically destroyed to save costs.

Benefits of Ephemeral Environments

  • Isolation: No more staging bottlenecks or 'who broke staging?' scenarios.
  • Testing: Allows PMs and QA to test features in isolation before merging.
  • Cost Savings: Environments are destroyed immediately when no longer needed.