Summary
In large regulated organisations, long-lived data platforms become operational liabilities. Over time, they accumulate security risks, undocumented changes, and technical debt—making change slow and recovery costly. Ephemeral infrastructure, designed to be rebuilt from scratch every day, offers a proven way to reduce risk, cut costs, accelerate change, and maintain compliance without exhausting operational teams.
"Servers should be like phoenixes: regularly dying and being rebuilt from the ashes."
— Martin Fowler, 2012
The Problem with Long-Lived Platforms
According to the State of DevOps Report 2023 by Puppet Labs, 73% of organisations still treat their infrastructure as "pets"—unique, hand-crafted, and irreplaceable.
These environments are difficult to change without risk. Over time, they:
- Accumulate configuration drift and outdated patches
- Depend on undocumented processes and individual knowledge
- Require lengthy cycles for updates or recovery
The result is a fragile operational posture, where maintenance dominates resources and innovation stalls.
The Ephemeral Solution
An ephemeral platform starts fresh each day or whenever required. It shuts down after use and is rebuilt to the approved standard—ensuring it’s always secure, up to date, and ready for the next task. In practice, this means:
- Security: Vulnerabilities are removed with each rebuild.
- Compliance: Drift from approved baselines is eliminated daily.
- Resilience: Disaster recovery becomes part of normal operations.
Core Principles
Achieving the benefits of ephemeral infrastructure requires discipline in architecture and operations. Key principles include:
- Design for Destruction – All application state is externalised to durable storage. Compute resources are stateless, disposable, and fully defined in code.
- Relentless Automation – Infrastructure creation, configuration, and teardown are executed through repeatable pipelines, reducing manual error and easing auditability.
- Separation of Compute and Data – Sensitive or mission-critical data remains in secure, persistent stores, while compute resources are temporary and replaceable.
The Future is Ephemeral
The ephemeral revolution is not just about technology—it is about operational freedom and security: freedom from maintenance, freedom from technical debt, and freedom to innovate without fear. A data platform does not need to be a pet nurtured for years; it can be a phoenix that rises fresh each day, ready to serve without the baggage of yesterday.
Some benefits include:
- Over 90% reduction in patching and maintenance effort
- Significant cost savings by eliminating idle, long-running compute
- Faster accreditation due to consistent, auditable deployments
Digital transformation has a secret: it's not about what you build, but what you're brave enough to retire. With ephemeral infrastructure running most data and AI workloads securely and cost-effectively, there’s never been a better time to let legacy systems finally rest in peace.
Ready to Let Your Platform Die?
Practical examples of use cases using Kubox ephemeral data and AI platforms in action:
- Exploratory Data Analysis
- Processing One Trillion Rows
- Urban Growth Hotspots Across Australia for $15
- Audio Analysis with Machine Learning
- Self-hosted LLM Chatbot
Because the best platform is one that's not afraid to die.
P.S. If a platform can be rebuilt in 10 minutes every day, is it still justifiable to maintain one that cannot?