Cutting Cloud Costs with Ephemeral Data Environments: Perforce Delphix Demo

Discover how the Perforce Delphix DevOps Data Platform empowers enterprises to dramatically reduce cloud expenditures by leveraging ephemeral data environments. This demonstration showcases how your teams can provision, manage, and decommission secure, multi-terabyte ephemeral test data environments in minutes, not hours or days. The traditional approach to non-production environments is slow, manual, and results in underutilized, long-lived infrastructure that inflates cloud costs. By adopting an on-demand model, you can accelerate development and testing cycles while eliminating significant cloud waste.

The video provides a practical walkthrough of the entire process, starting with ingesting and masking sensitive production data to create lightweight, compliant virtual copies. You will see a real-world scenario where a tester instantly provisions a fresh QA database for an application test, executes their test plan, and then decommissions the entire infrastructure stack through a simple, automated pipeline. This process highlights how Delphix’s self-service capabilities and data bookmarks enable rapid refreshes and greater efficiency.

By implementing ephemeral data environments with Delphix, organizations can achieve substantial operational and financial benefits. 

Key advantages include:

• Reduce cloud compute and storage costs by up to 85% by spinning environments up and down on demand.
• Accelerate application testing by providing developers and testers with fast, self-service access to fresh, compliant data.
• Improve data security and compliance with automated masking for sensitive information, ensuring PII and PHI are protected.
• Enhance developer productivity by eliminating long waits for data provisioning and environment setup.

Get Ephemeral Data Environments

See firsthand how Delphix can transform your data operations and deliver a significant return on investment. Request a no-pressure demo to explore how ephemeral data can optimize your cloud strategy.

Demo Ephemeral Data in Delphix

Full Transcript

Hi there. I'm Grant Ward. I work for Perforce Delphix. I have spent many years helping customers solve complex data use cases. Today, we are going to discuss ephemeral databases and what that means to you from a cloud cost perspective.

Please also remember to check out additional Perforce Delphix videos that my colleagues are creating around different use cases.

How does Delphix work?

Delphix ingests data from any source. These sources are typically production environments.

Delphix then profiles this data for any sensitive values and masks those values with realistic data that contains referential integrity.

Delphix can then virtualize your data, giving you an unlimited number of copies available in a test data library.

These can then be accessed by your data consumers via self-service.

Delphix also has an intelligent API integration layer that allows you to automate within any of your existing data pipelines.

We're here to talk about ephemeral database environments and how these work in the context of Delphix.

Typically, environments in the cloud are rigid, long-lived, and underutilized.

And provisioning data environments is slow and manual.

In the context of Delphix, we have seen customers saving up to 85% of their cloud costs associated with these database environments.

Delphix can spin up and tear down environments in a matter of minutes and has better utilization for these data environments across the board.

We also have integration with existing automation tools to ensure your infrastructure is well-managed behind these databases.

Let's jump into the demonstration and take a look at what an ephemeral database looks like in practice.

This is your Delphix data environment. As you can see, we have a connection library of all of our source and target production and non-production environments available in Delphix.

We also have all of our production sources that have been ingested into the platform.

These sources have all been masked.

We also have our data library of virtual databases.

This represents different versions of data at different points in time, and all of these virtual copies are lightweight and efficient.

As you can see, everything is running offline, which is important because we do not want to consume cloud costs unnecessarily.

I have my sample banking application here. As you can see, the developers have provided me with a new version of the application that I, as the testing team, need to test.

The application is ready, but I do not have a database available. I need to log a ticket for my DBA team to provide me with a new, fresh copy of my QA environment.

That will take several hours. This delay is due to the size and complexity of multi-terabyte datasets, as finding and restoring backups is a lengthy process.

In Delphix, that is not the case. I am going to show you a data pipeline which is going to take one of my ephemeral databases and bring it online in a matter of minutes. I am going to kick off this pipeline right now.

If we switch back to our Delphix environment, we can see what is happening with my QA databases.

We can now see our QA databases coming online. It has taken approximately a minute, and now we can switch over and start testing our application.

You can see our application is now online and ready to go. In one minute, I spun up an ephemeral database that supports this application.

As a tester, I only need this environment to be accessible for as long as I need to run my tests.

I am going to do some testing. Let's create a new savings account over here.

And there is my new savings account that I have just created.

I will obviously run through several thousand tests as a tester.

And at the end of it, the data is no longer usable in the same format it was when it was originally provided to me. A key benefit of Delphix is that we still have access to these virtual databases and the ability to bookmark them. You will see that this virtual database was bookmarked at the start of my testing cycle.

It is very simple for me via self-service to refresh my database back to this bookmark.

If I go back into my banking application and refresh, you can see my data is back to its original form.

Lastly, once we have finished using our environment, we want to ensure a pipeline exists to stop and tear down the environment when it is no longer needed.

If we now have a look at our virtual databases in our Delphix environment, we can now see that they have been taken offline as well as the infrastructure associated with those databases has been decommissioned, saving me cloud costs.

On average, Delphix will save around 85% of your cloud costs associated with compute and storage.

I hope you enjoyed that. Please reach out to us if you have data or compliance challenges you would like to discuss. We can show you how we can deliver a return on investment in six months.

Thank you for your time today.