Discussing Deployments and Environments

What is an environment?

An environment can be a namespace, a whole cluster, or even a federation of clusters that didn’t help, so let’s try a different approach.

An environment is a collection of applications and their associated resources. Production can be considered an environment. It can be located in a single namespace, it can span the whole cluster, or it can be distributed across the fleet of clusters. The scope of what production differs from one organization to another. What matters is that it's a collection of applications. The same can be said for staging, preproduction, integration, previews, and many other environments. What they all have in common is that there are one or more logically grouped applications.

To manage environments, we need quite a few things:

• We need to be able to define permissions, restrictions, limitations, and similar policies and constraints.

• We also need to be able to deploy and manage applications both individually and as a group.