Environments

What this screen is for

The Environments tab defines the deployment targets your teams work against — typically dev, staging and production — on the clusters you have registered.

Environments are what the Deploy area exposes, and what permission policies are scoped to. Until they exist, a policy cannot restrict anyone to dev.

Before you start

To do this You need
See the tab platform-settings.environment.read
Create an environment platform-settings.environment.create
Edit one platform-settings.environment.update
Delete one platform-settings.environment.delete

Register and validate a cluster first. An environment on an unvalidated cluster inherits its problems.

Opening it

  1. Settings › Infrastructure
  2. Select the Environments tab.

The interface

📸 Screenshot Placeholder: The Environments tab listing dev, staging and production. Mark: (1) Add button, (2) search field, (3) the cluster column, (4) the environment type, (5) the row actions.

# Control What it does When you’d use it
1 Add Opens the environment dialog Defining a new target
2 Search Filters the list Installs with many environments
3 Cluster Which registered cluster it runs on Understanding blast radius
4 Environment type dev, staging, or production This is what policies scope to
5 Row actions Edit, delete Maintenance

The environment type is not decoration. Permission policies condition on these exact values, and the backend expands flat permission names into per-environment variants using them. Getting the type wrong makes a policy apply to the wrong tier.

Walkthroughs

Create an environment

Requires platform-settings.environment.create.

  1. Settings › Infrastructure › Environments, click Add.
  2. Choose the cluster it runs on.
  3. Set the environment type — dev, staging, or production.
  4. Save.
  5. Go to Policies and confirm the new environment appears in the scope selector.

Delete an environment

Requires platform-settings.environment.delete.

Check first whether any policy is scoped to it. Deleting the environment does not update those policies, and a statement scoped to something that no longer exists is a confusing thing to inherit.

Scenario

Adding a second staging environment for a team that needs isolation.

Two teams keep colliding on one shared staging.

  1. Confirm the target cluster is registered and Valid.
  2. Settings › Infrastructure › Environments — create the new environment on that cluster, with type staging.
  3. Go to Policies. Existing staging policies are conditioned on the environment type, so they may now cover both staging environments — which is the opposite of the isolation you wanted.
  4. Narrow the affected statements: scope them by cluster as well as by environment type, so each team reaches only its own.
  5. Verify both teams in Access Explorer before telling them it is ready.

Step 3 is the trap. Adding an environment can silently widen existing policies, because the condition matches a type, not a specific environment.

When it doesn’t work

Symptom Cause How to check Fix
Cannot create an environment No validated cluster Clusters Register and validate a cluster
Environment absent from a policy’s scope selector Just created, or the policy was not reopened The Policies tab Reopen the policy
A new environment unexpectedly widened access Policies condition on environment type, not on a specific environment The affected policy statements Add a cluster resource to narrow them
Deployments target the wrong tier The environment type was set incorrectly The environment type column Correct the type, then re-check the policies
Policy scoped to a deleted environment Deleting an environment does not update policies The policy statements Edit the policy

Next

  • Policies — scope access to these environments
  • Deploy — what teams do with them