Ephemeral Environment Practices - the Good, Bad, and Ugly
summary
An Argo CD hub‑and‑spoke setup on EKS uses ApplicationSet generators and the Argo PR generator to spin PR preview environments by rendering manifests in CI and committing them to git; this delivers live previews in minutes but created hundreds of PR apps that hit GitHub API rate limits, ballooned one dev cluster to ~50,000 tracked objects and stretched application controller queue times from <1 minute to hours. Cleanup uses TTL label removal (one week) and DNS via external-dns behind VPN.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Ephemeral environments intro
- 2:07Internal dev platform goals
- 7:41Why ephemeral environments matter
- 9:26PR environments in practice
- 11:32Early PR environment challenges
- 13:41Fixing PR environment chaos
- 15:28PR generator success and issues
- 17:14GitOps scaling pitfalls
- 19:21Lessons learned
- 21:09Q&A on routing and dependencies
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