Ephemeral Cloud Clusters#

Ephemeral clusters exist for one purpose: validate something, then disappear. They are not staging environments, not shared dev clusters, not long-lived resources that someone forgets to turn off. The operational model is strict – create, validate, destroy – and the entire sequence must be automated so that destruction cannot be forgotten.

The cost of getting this wrong is real. A three-node EKS cluster left running over a weekend costs roughly $15. Left running for a month, $200. Multiply by the number of developers or CI pipelines that create clusters, and forgotten ephemeral infrastructure becomes a significant budget line item. Every template in this article includes auto-destroy mechanisms to prevent this.