Origin

Greek ephemeros “lasting only a day”.

Definition

The opposite of persistant.

Examples

RAM

  • RAM is ephemeral whereas hard disk storage is persistant.

Data structures

Data structures are ephemeral because properties can be mutated and there’s no way to get back the original object

const dinner = {
    main: 'turkey',
    side: 'potatoes'
}
 
dinner.side = 'potatoes'
 
console.log(dinner) // { main: 'turkey', side: 'potatoes' }

Cloud computing

  • AWS Lambda
  • Google Cloud Functions