In today’s fast-paced cloud-native development world, infrastructure management is often a dynamic process that requires flexibility, speed, and scalability. HashiCorp Terraform has long been a go-to tool for infrastructure as code (IaC), but as teams embrace more agile and continuous development workflows, there is an increasing need for lightweight, disposable, and cost-efficient environments. This is where ephemeral workspaces in HCP Terraform come in.

In this talk, I’ll explore the power of ephemeral workspaces—temporary, isolated environments that can be created and destroyed automatically/on-demand in the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Designed to streamline infrastructure workflows, ephemeral workspaces enable developers, operations teams, and DevOps practitioners to work faster and with greater flexibility by removing the overhead of long-lived environments.

I’ll start with an introduction to HCP Terraform and how it extends the Terraform experience with managed cloud services. Attendees will learn about ephemeral workspaces, which allow the spinning up and tear down of entire infrastructure environments quickly and easily, all within the HashiCorp ecosystem.

Throughout the talk, I’ll cover key use cases where ephemeral workspaces are effective:

CI/CD Pipelines: Use HCP Terraform VCS integration to deploy infrastructure for changes made in the GitHub repository
Experimentation and Sandboxing: Developers can quickly test infrastructure changes or try out new configurations in a disposable, isolated environment—without risking their production systems or incurring long-term costs.
Cost Efficiency: Ephemeral workspaces optimize infrastructure spend by ensuring that the infrastructure is auto-destroyed at a future date based on the configuration.

This talk will also feature a short live demo where the attendees see firsthand how to:
Create an ephemeral workspace from scratch in HCP Terraform.
Manage infrastructure within the workspace using Terraform’s familiar workflows.
Examine and enable the auto-destroy feature of HCP Terraform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCV_wO0QlnA