Ephemeral environments cut cloud costs by half in branching strategy shift

A team moved from static subscription-per-environment to on-demand provisioning tied to branch lifecycles, reducing non-prod subscriptions from four to one or two. The approach required idempotent IaC templates, exposing gaps like a manual Key Vault policy that broke fresh environments. Compliance teams may prefer fixed environments for audit continuity, but the trade-off was worth it when controls mattered more than resource birthdates.