Understanding Environments

In Quant Cloud, an Environment represents an isolated instance of your application with its own independent resources and configuration. This allows you to maintain separate setups for different stages of your development lifecycle.

Common Environment Types

Most applications use environments to support their development and deployment workflow:

Production Your live environment that serves real users. This should be stable, well-monitored, and carefully managed with proper backup and scaling configurations.

Staging A pre-production environment used for final testing and quality assurance. Staging should mirror your production setup as closely as possible to catch issues before they reach users.

Development Used by developers for active coding and testing of new features. Development environments typically have relaxed security settings and may use smaller resource allocations to reduce costs.

Feature Branches Temporary environments created to test specific features or code branches. These are often created and destroyed as needed during the development process.

Environment Isolation

Each environment operates independently with its own:

• Container configuration based on your compose definition
• Persistent storage volumes that don’t interfere with other environments
• Environment variables and secrets specific to that environment’s needs
• Scaling settings appropriate for the environment’s purpose
• Running instances that operate separately from other environments

Tip

This isolation means you can safely test new code, configuration changes, or data migrations in development or staging without any risk to your production environment.

Benefits of Environment Separation

Stability and Safety Changes or issues in development or staging environments have no impact on your live production environment. You can experiment freely without worrying about affecting real users.

Effective Testing Test new features, configuration changes, or deployments in an environment that closely matches production before rolling changes out to users.

Team Collaboration Different team members can work on different features in dedicated environments without interfering with each other’s work or shared resources.

Deployment Confidence By testing in staging first, you can deploy to production with confidence that your changes work as expected in a production-like environment.

Managing Environments

All environments belong to a specific application and are managed within that application’s context. From your application’s dashboard, you can create new environments, modify existing ones, or deploy updates to specific environments without affecting others.

This environment-based approach supports modern development practices like continuous integration and deployment, where code moves through a pipeline from development through staging to production.

Quant Cloud enables you to create, manage, and deploy these environments efficiently through the portal.