Environment
On Ownkube, an environment is a named stage, such as Development, Staging or Production, that groups related deployments and gives them their own configuration. Every deployment belongs to exactly one environment. Deployment names are unique within an environment, so api can exist in Development and in Production without a collision.
Every organization starts with Development and Production, and you can add as many more as you need, for example a staging or qa stage for pre-release testing. Deployments in different environments are separate workloads with separate variables, scale and data: a Production database is never shared with Development by accident. Each environment can also carry shared variables that every deployment in it inherits, which is where values like NODE_ENV or a shared API base URL belong.
Environments are the unit you promote between. Promotion copies the live revision of a deployment onto its counterpart in another environment, typically Staging to Production, while each side keeps its own secrets. On Ownkube Compute, environments run side by side with nothing to provision. In your own AWS account, you can also split environments across clusters, for example a Starter cluster for Development and a Production cluster for live traffic. Colour-coded badges in the dashboard make it obvious which environment you are looking at.