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Manage Environment Types

Learn how to use Environment Types in Humanitec

Introduction

Humanitec makes it easy to define and work with different types of environments. Typical types of environments are development environments, QA environments, staging/pre-production environments, and production environments. In Humanitec, you can define Environment Types to group and manage environments for your team. Every Environment in Humanitec has exactly one Environment Type.
Environment Types can be used with External Resources to manage where resources such as databases are provisioned or even which Kubernetes cluster to deploy to.

Example

Let's look at a simple example of how Environment Types can be used when building an Internal Developer Platform. It is very common to use different infrastructure for development vs. production environments. Let's assume a team wants to use the infrastructure listed below in their day-to-day work.
Infrastructure
Development
Production
Kubernetes Cluster
EKS cluster with namespace separation
Dedicated AKS cluster
DNS
Dynamically generated URLs
Static URL
Databases
Dynamically generated RDS databases
Static self-managed databases
File Storage
Dynamically generated S3 buckets
Static Azure File Storage
The easiest way to achieve this setup in Humanitec is to use two different Environment Types (e.g., development and production) to define the infrastructure that should be used/provisioned depending on the type of the environment. The following sections explain how to achieve this step by step.

View and Add Environment Types

To add a new environment type, you will need to have the Administrator role within your Organization. Existing environment types can additionally be viewed by users holding the Manager role. Learn more about RBAC in Humanitec here.
UI
CLI
API
  • All Environment Types defined for your organization are listed in the Environment Types sceen accessible from the navigation bar.
  • You can use this view to add and delete Environment Types. Note that you can only delete Environment Types that are not connected with any existing Environment in your Apps. You can add a short description for each Environment Type.
  • You can assign resources to the Environment Types directly from the Resource Management screen.
Our CLI is currently in closed beta. Please contact us if you want to learn more.
New environment types can be added via Add Environment Type endpoint.

Use Environment Types

UI
CLI
API
The Environment Type is shown below each of your Environments in Humanitec. Whenever you create a new Environment you are asked which Environment Type the new Environment should be based on. The Environment Type then determines which Infrastructure is used for your Environment.
Example for Environment Types shown on the App Details Page
Our CLI is currently in closed beta. Please contact us if you want to learn more.
New environments (and their according environment type) are created via the Add New Environment endpoint.