Temporary Environments: Why You Should Use Spot/Preemptible Instances

Temporary environments often live far longer than intended — and on expensive, permanent compute.
For short-lived development or QA tasks, this is unnecessary cloud spend.

Use Spot Instances (AWS) or Preemptible VMs (GCP) instead.

🔹 Why it matters

Cost efficiency:
Spot compute is typically 3–5x cheaper than on-demand instances.

Security:
Spot instances disappear automatically — nothing is accidentally left running.

Resilience:
If your environment can be recreated instantly, your infrastructure is genuinely healthy.

Team discipline:
Ephemeral environments encourage reproducibility and reduce manual drift.

🔹 How to implement it

• Use Spot for non-critical workloads, CI builds, integration tests
• Add interruption handling (auto-recreate logic)
• Tag everything with TTL metadata (expire_at, cleanup=true)
• Use mixed instance policies for longer jobs

Staging and test environments should not behave like mini-production.
They should be cheap, reproducible, and disposable.