The 3 Bs of Ephemeral Data: Benefits, Best Practices, & Business Case

There’s one thing I constantly hear from IT and application development leaders. Ephemeral data is absolutely essential to bring down cloud costs and provide operational excellence for their processes.

But they often lack the right tools to automate ephemeral data and integrate it into their pipelines.

In this blog, I share insights, best practices, and the business case for automating ephemeral data in the enterprise. Let’s get started!

What Exactly Is Ephemeral Data?

Ephemeral data is lightweight, temporary information created and used for short-term tasks in apps or systems. It’s used while it’s needed, and it’s removed when it’s no longer needed. 

Take testing environments, for example. In most enterprises, developers and quality assurance (QA) engineers rely on static, pre-built environments that may periodically get refreshed or updated. These users can instead use ephemeral data to mimic real-world conditions, then delete it once testing is complete. Simple, efficient, and no clutter left behind.

Ephemeral Data vs. Persistent Data

The main difference between ephemeral data vs. persistent data is the storage timeframe. Ephemeral data is stored for short-term use, while persistent data is stored for long-term use and frequent reuse.

Key Characteristics

Ephemeral Data

The key characteristics of ephemeral data are:

• Short lifespan: It only lasts for a short time, such as during one transaction or session.
• Non-persistent: Data may not be stored permanently, saving on storage costs and reducing security risks.
• Scalable and flexible: It allows compute environments to expand or shrink based on needs. This makes managing cloud costs easier.
• Secure: Its temporary nature helps reduce exposure to sensitive data. 

Persistent Data

The key characteristics of persistent data are:

• Long-term lifespan: Persistent data survives reboots, system shutdowns, or crashes.
• Persistent storage: It is stored on hard drives, SSDs, physical databases, or data lakes, making it accessible even after the creation process ends.
• Reliable: Designed to be durable and available, persistent data usually includes backup solutions to prevent data loss. 

Broad use cases: Examples include production databases, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environments, and hot standby databases.

Key Differences

Here’s how ephemeral data and persistent data stack up against one another.

The Benefits of Both

The reality is that most enterprises should use both ephemeral and persistent data.

There will always be use cases for persistent data. Obviously you can’t run production ephemerally, although it’s possible to incorporate ephemerality into micro-services requiring point-in-time access to production-like data. 

But there are times when your organization can and should use ephemeral data to save on cloud resources. This type of data enables you to build cloud infrastructure or utilize purpose-built DevOps container tools like Kubernetes, and load datasets to it in minutes. Use it. Terminate it when it’s done — without losing anything. 

You can still have persistent data, but it doesn’t need to cost you so much for every use case. Particularly in your downstream environments like development and QA, where you may only need datasets for short bursts like sprints.

How to Automate Ephemeral Data Provisioning with Perforce Delphix

Modern app development needs to be fast, flexible, and precise. Manual processes just don’t cut it anymore. That’s why automation is so important, especially for setting up ephemeral data environments. 

With Perforce Delphix, your IT and application development teams can speed things up and work more efficiently by automating these setups. What’s more, you can have the best of both worlds: persistent, highly-compressed data storage that can be made available in minutes for ephemeral use-cases and torn down just as fast. 

Why Automate Ephemeral Data Environments? 

Developers and QA teams need non-production environments that are as close to real production systems as possible to test things properly. But creating these environments manually takes too much time, leads to mistakes, and uses up too many resources. Stale development and QA environments kill productivity and make it easier for bugs to slip through the release process, all while costing your organization more money to always keep them alive.

How Delphix Helps 

Delphix uses virtual database technology alongside automation to create entire downstream environments in just minutes. Using cloud automation or Kubernetes, Delphix can provide full, realistic, compliant database environments of any size for development and testing. Advanced APIs and pre-built integrations also connect easily to CI/CD pipelines, letting teams quickly set up, bookmark, rewind, and tear down these environments on demand. This not only saves time but also ensures resources are only used when needed.

With Delphix, teams can skip the delays of manual processes and focus on delivering better software faster — all while keeping data secure and well-managed. There don’t need to be DevOps bottlenecks.

Here’s how Delphix can integrate into your DevOps workflows to make the process more efficient:

Delphix integrates with Terraform, a tool for managing infrastructure, and Jenkins, a CI/CD automation tool, to set up target environments automatically. And of course we also integrate with Puppet, an infrastructure automation platform from Perforce, to serve QA security profiles and pick the appropriate environments.

Then Delphix can provision secure, compliant ephemeral databases in just minutes. For testing against ephemeral data, adding in tools like BlazeMeter, a continuous testing tool from Perforce, helps simulate multiple testing scenarios, which is especially useful for QA teams. 

4 Best Practices for Ephemeral Test Data Management

Managing test data effectively is a huge challenge for many organizations. According to Perforce’s annual State of Continuous Testing Report, 64% of organizations struggle with the manual effort required to manage test data, while 39% report issues with incomplete test data. These challenges are compounded by concerns about data quality, integrity, and compliance, all of which underscore the need for better test data management strategies. 

One of the most promising solutions to these challenges is ephemeral test data environments. These are short-lived, production-like environments generated temporarily for testing purposes. Their temporary nature ensures that environments are clean, standardized, and disposable — reducing the risk of data breaches and simplifying compliance with regulatory requirements.

Use Automation

Manual processes for creating test data are time-consuming and prone to errors. Leveraging automation tools to generate ephemeral test data can save valuable time while ensuring consistency and accuracy. 

With test data automation, developers can create realistic test data that adheres to the same rules and structures as production data, thus improving the reliability of test results. On the backend, tools like Delphix can provide complete, masked datasets for your test applications. And tools like synthetic data generators and automated testing scripts provided in Blazemeter can randomly populate front-end fields based on pre-defined rules, automating the entire test cycle.

Integrate With Pipelines

An effective way to manage ephemeral environments is by integrating them with automated data pipelines using tools like Git or Perforce Helix Core. For example, developers can use Git hooks to automate actions during the Git flow. When a pull request is submitted to merge changes into a QA branch, a Git hook can trigger a data pipeline in an automation orchestrator like Jenkins.

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This pipeline can:

• Spin up an entire application stack within minutes, including a fully masked, production-like copy of the data.
• Run automated tests against this environment, ensuring high-quality output.
• Bookmark the final datasets used for testing to re-create the testing scenario if required.
• Terminate the infrastructure once testing is complete, reporting results back to the pull request.

This fully automated process minimizes manual errors and significantly reduces risks in development cycles by ensuring environments are realistic, isolated, and compliant. 

De-Risk Development Cycles

Ephemeral environments play a vital role in "de-risking" development cycles. By using immutable data stores in Delphix, you can ensure that test data remains available while also being protected and unaltered during deployment. These environments also help protect sensitive data.

Adopting these best practices not only enhances the efficiency of test data management but also improves the overall quality of software releases. By leveraging ephemeral environments in conjunction with automation and secure data handling, you can overcome the common challenges of test data management while driving greater innovation and stability in their applications.

Ensure Compliance

Immutable data stores, like those provided by Delphix, play a crucial role in maintaining compliance while handling ephemeral test data. 

By design, Delphix ensures that data cannot be altered, changed, or accessed without creating a secure target environment. Even then, the target environment’s changes are private to that environment, and never in any way can alter source data. This immutability safeguards sensitive information and provides an added layer of security to meet stringent regulatory standards such as GDPR and HIPAA.

When utilizing ephemeral data for building development and testing environments, the data is only kept online (using compute) for the time required to complete the task. This significantly reduces the data’s exposure window, decreasing potential attack vectors and minimizing the opportunity for unauthorized access or data breaches. By ensuring data does not sit idle on disparate servers for extended periods, you effectively enhance security and simplify compliance efforts.

The Business Case: Money and Automation

The business case boils down to money and automation. 

By modularizing team actions into automatable chunks and employing just-in-time data sources, enterprises save on infrastructure and management costs. Delphix plays a major role in reducing these costs further by enabling lightweight data clones and ephemeral environments. This is especially important for managing cloud costs.

This reduces the high price of data. Most enterprises that I work with find that Delphix reduces costs by 30-50%. And a recent IDC white paper — The Business Value of Delphix — found that enterprises can recognize $8.4 million in additional revenue from improved software development team productivity, as a result of automating data and reducing infrastructure costs. 

IDC: The Business Value of Delphix

Analyst study of customers shows that the Delphix DevOps Data Platform delivers a 408% 3-year ROI. Discover the tangible benefits of Delphix, validated by IDC analysts.

Get the IDC White Paper

There are endless examples I’ve heard from customers on how Delphix helps them save money through automation.

When it comes to money, our customers share clear results:

• Proximus saved £7 million over 3 years in testing labor.
• Express Scripts saved $1.6 million in cost avoidance
• Cal State University saved $2 million in development storage.
• Mizuho Securities saved $700,000 in labor costs each year.

When it comes to automation, the savings are just as clear:

• Mattel reduced man hours by 600% and reduced the database size by 8 TB.
• Sky Italia saw a 90% reduction in infrastructure footprint and a 30% reduction in operating costs.
• Gain Capital increased business output by 20%.

Delphix Automates Ephemeral Data Delivery

Legacy approaches to data delivery often involve manual processes that take days or weeks, creating bottlenecks in critical DevOps, test data management, analytics, and AI projects. Delphix automates these processes and delivers secure application data in just minutes.

Related blog >> What Is Delphix?

Virtualization Transforms Data Delivery Speed, Storage

Delphix syncs with production data sources then instantly provisions space-efficient virtual data copies for non-production use cases, both on-premises and in the cloud. Rather than making and moving new data blocks, Delphix intelligently shares common data blocks across downstream environments over the network. The result? Delphix accelerates provisioning times by 100x while reducing storage footprints by 10x. 

Explore Delphix for virtualization >>

Integrate Data Masking with Data Virtualization

The Delphix DevOps Data Platform combines masking with virtualization to deliver compliant data to downstream environments. Delphix masking discovers sensitive values and then irreversibly transforms those values into realistic yet fictitious equivalents for protection against breach and compliance with privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.

Fast, Compliant Ephemeral Data Delivery

Try Delphix and see how advanced data virtualization and data masking accelerate innovation. Request a no-pressure demo today. You’ll find out why industry leaders choose Delphix to deliver the right data to the right teams at the right time.

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