Postgres for Ephemeral Environments: A Method to Keep Data Persistent

Building and maintaining traditional persistent environments for software development can be resource-intensive and cumbersome, particularly due to challenges such as configuration drift, seed data maintenance, concurrency issues, and high costs. To address these, teams are increasingly adopting ephemeral environments, which are temporary, on-demand setups that can be automatically created and discarded, offering greater flexibility and integration into CI/CD pipelines. However, replicating production-like databases in these environments often presents a bottleneck due to the time-consuming process of loading seed data. Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, offers a solution by allowing the rapid deployment of Postgres databases using lightweight, copy-on-write branches that reference a single source of truth, enabling quick and efficient data consistency across ephemeral environments. This approach reduces maintenance overhead and costs while supporting scalable and agile workflows.