When building an application, teams typically need dedicated development and testing environments. Persistent environments, which mimic production as closely as possible, are often set up but come with significant overhead due to maintenance issues such as configuration drift, seed data maintenance, concurrency problems, and growing costs. In contrast, ephemeral environments are temporary, on-demand environments that can be created and torn down automatically, reducing maintenance overhead. However, a common challenge in ephemeral environments is managing databases that need to populate each environment, which can lead to similar issues as persistent environments. To address this, Neon branches are used to deploy Postgres databases in seconds, with data, offering copy-on-write magic, ready instantly, ephemeral by design, and one-click reset features. By integrating Neon branches into ephemeral environments, teams can solve the last major hurdle holding their speed down – databases.