Ephemeral Storage
Ephemeral storage refers to temporary, non-persistent data storage that exists only for the duration of a specific process, session, or application lifecycle. It is typically used for caching, temporary files, or intermediate data that does not need to be retained long-term. This type of storage is often volatile, meaning data is lost when the system restarts or the process ends.
Developers should use ephemeral storage when handling transient data that doesn't require persistence, such as session data in web applications, temporary uploads, or cache files, to improve performance and reduce costs. It's essential in cloud-native and containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes pods) where stateless applications rely on temporary storage for runtime operations without long-term data retention needs.