Disposable Cloud Environment (DCE)TM

The Disposable Cloud Environment (DCE) provides temporary, limited Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. Accounts can be “leased” for a period of time or up to a pre-determined budget amount. When the period of time is reached or the maximum budgeted amount is exceeded, the lease is expired. The leased account is reset and returned to a pool of accounts to be leased again.

At a high-level, DCE consists of AWS Lambda functions (implemented in Go), Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics, and APIs exposed with Amazon API Gateway. These resources are created in the AWS account using Hashicorp Terraform.

Why DCE?

DCE is your playground in the cloud

With a DCE account, you have a safe environment to experiment with in the cloud. With near-administrative access to an AWS account, you can click around the AWS web console or run AWS CLI commands from your terminal. As a developer in an organization, you don’t need to worry about cost management or orphaned resources.

Budget limits

DCE can be configured to expire account leases (see Concepts documentation) based on a budgeted amount for usage.

Once the account hits a weekly spending limit, the account will be automatically wiped clean so there are no surprise bills at the end of the month.

Timed leases

DCE contains the concept of expiring leases. A lease represents temporary access to an account for a certain amount of time. Once the lease is expired, the AWS account is cleaned of all of the resources and returned to the pool for other people to lease.

Getting started

To get started using DCE, see the quickstart.

Viewing the source

The source code for DCE can be found on GitHub.