Shared Environments Could Be Costing Your Company Millions
Testing code shouldn’t feel like booking a conference room. And yet, in many engineering teams, that’s exactly what it’s like.
Modern software development has evolved quickly. We’ve embraced microservices, cloud-native infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines. But there’s one area where many teams are still stuck in the past: development environments. In particular, giving developers realistic, production-like environments to test their changes end-to-end remains a huge bottleneck.
Let’s talk about why this happens and how giving developers self-service access to ephemeral environments is key to increasing the productivity of your engineering organization.
The Hidden Cost of Shared Environments
In many organizations, realistic testing environments are scarce. Developers rely on a handful of staging environments to validate their changes end-to-end. These environments are expensive to maintain and quickly become bottlenecks.
The result is a familiar but frustrating pattern:
- Developers queue up to use staging
- Environments are hard to reset and often break due to leftover state
- Feedback loops are slow, and confidence in test results is low
- Teams lose hours (or days) debugging issues that stem from shared infra, not their code
This doesn't just affect developer happiness, it directly impacts throughput and business outcomes.
Quantifying the Problem: Exponential Cost Impact
To put some numbers behind this, let’s start simply. For baseline purposes, you have developers earning roughly $100,000 annually - that's about $50 per hour. With just 10 developers each losing about 8 productive hours a week, you're already looking at $4,000 per week in lost productivity. But here's the catch: as your team gets larger, the environment becomes more crowded. More developers mean more traffic, more waiting, more downtime, and far more troubleshooting. Think of it like a traffic jam, the bigger it gets, the slower everyone moves. That's why the costs don't just increase linearly; they grow exponentially.
The Right Way: Ephemeral Environments on Demand
Imagine a world where every developer can spin up their own development environment: on-demand, fully configured, and production-like. One command, and it’s live. One click and it’s gone.
These ephemeral environments are:
- Created automatically when needed
- Destroyed when no longer in use
- Consistent with production, eliminating environment drift and configuration mismatches.
- Integrated with your existing Development and CI workflows
They give developers a fresh, clean slate for every change. And the benefits are clear:
🔁 Faster Development Cycles
No more waiting in line for a staging slot. Developers test immediately after they code. That translates into faster feedback loops, fewer context switches, and more momentum.
✅ Higher Quality Code
Testing in a clean, isolated environment increases confidence in test results and reduces the risk of environment-specific bugs slipping into production.
🚫 Reduced Rework
When bugs are caught earlier and in the right context, teams spend less time fixing regressions, patching hotfixes, or unraveling integration issues late in the pipeline.
💸 Lower Infrastructure Costs
Instead of keeping large, expensive staging environments up 24/7, ephemeral environments spin up only when needed—and spin down automatically. You only pay for what you use.
📈 Accelerated Time-to-Market
By eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating time-to-feedback, your team can ship value to customers faster with higher quality and less overhead.
The Platform Engineering Advantage
Shifting to ephemeral environments benefits not only developers but also the broader platform engineering team:
- Reduces the operational burden of maintaining fragile shared infra
- Shifts environment ownership closer to developers (without giving up control)
- Scales seamlessly with team growth
- Demonstrates measurable impact on velocity and cost optimization
It’s a clear win for developer productivity and platform efficiency.
Conclusion
The best teams remove friction from the development process. Shared staging environments were a necessary evil in the past, but they don’t scale with the complexity of today’s systems.
By giving developers access to self-service ephemeral environments, organizations can significantly reduce costs, improve productivity, and accelerate their delivery cycles.
Investing in ephemeral environments is not merely about developer experience. It's a strategic move toward increased profitability and innovation velocity.
