Ephemeral Environments: Testing at its Best in the Cloud

Archana Kattilakath Chandrasekharan

15:30 - 16:15 CEST, Wednesday 17th June

At Booking.com, a single booking touches dozens of services, from pricing and availability to payments and notifications. Testing a new feature often feels like performing brain surgery on a moving train: shared environments are crowded, datasets are inconsistent, and one small change by another team can break your tests.

In this session, I’ll take you on a journey of experimenting with ephemeral environments in AWS to solve this problem. We’ll explore how personal environments, originally designed for isolated service-level development, can be leveraged to test integrations safely and predictably.

Through real-world examples, you’ll learn:

* How ephemeral environments can give each developer a “mini-production” for their branch.

* The challenges of testing complex workflows like bookings when multiple upstream and downstream services are involved.

* How a simple JSON manifest describing service dependencies can help spin up consistent, reproducible environments.

* The trade-offs between service-level integration testing and full end-to-end system testing, and how to navigate them.

By the end of the talk, you’ll see how ephemeral environments aren’t just a nice-to-have; they’re a practical tool to reduce friction, increase confidence, and speed up development, even in systems as complex as Booking.com.

Join me to hear the story of trial, experimentation, and lessons learned from trying to test a multi-service system in a world of shared environments, dev pipelines, and evolving dependencies.

What you will learn

How to leverage personal/ephemeral environments to test features safely and in isolation
How to manage service dependencies using manifests for predictable integration testing
Practical tips for reducing friction when testing in complex, multi-service systems

Session Details

Intermediate
45 minutes
Includes 15 mins Q&A
Efficiencies and new capabilities

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Check out this video from Archana Kattilakath Chandrasekharan to hear more about her talk on Ephemeral Environments: Testing at its Best in the Cloud.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2026.

Session Speakers

Archana Kattilakath Chandrasekharan

Booking Holdings, India

Archana is a test engineer who thrives on making testing smarter, faster, and a lot more fun. She’s switched between developer and tester roles, which gives her a unique perspective on how to bridge the gap between shipping features and ensuring quality. In her current RegTech team, she has built scalable API test frameworks, experimented with ephemeral environments, and is actively reworking the process flow for building machine-learning systems focusing on how quality, validation, and accountability must evolve when models, data, and experimentation become first-class citizens in product development.

She enjoys sharing real-world lessons, both wins and facepalms. Outside of work, she’s always learning something new, from diving into AI to diving under the sea.

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