Persistent non-production database environments are a hidden tax on engineering teams, expensive to run, time-consuming to maintain, and a real security risk. Yet most organisations accept them as the cost of doing business. They don't have to.

In this session we'll explore how Amazon RDS and Aurora provide the building blocks for a true on-demand model, where environments exist only when needed, are created consistently from controlled source images, and are torn down automatically when they're not.

We'll walk through the automation patterns that make this work in practice, building source images, spinning up environments on demand for developers, and integrating ephemeral databases into CI/CD pipelines so every build gets a clean, consistent environment without the overhead of keeping one running around the clock.

If your teams are wrestling with slow provisioning, environment drift, or the overhead of managing non-production infrastructure, this session will give you a practical path to doing it differently.