Environments

Meshery Environments allow you to logically group related Connections and their associated Credentials. Environments make it easier for you to manage, share, and work with a collection of resources as a group, instead of dealing with all your Connections and Credentials on an individual basis.

Assigning Resources to an Environment

Assign any number of Connections to an environment whether that Connection is managed or unmanaged (see MeshSync to learn more about managed and unmanaged Connections). In-turn, assign any number of Environments to one or more Workspaces. Connections (and any associated Credentials) that are assigned to an Environment become immediately available for use in any associated Workspace.

Sharing Resources between Environments

Environments can share resources. For example, you might create an environment named “production” and assign three connections: a GitHub connection, a Kubernetes connection, and a Prometheus connection. Subsequently, you also define a an environment named “dev/test “and assign three connections: a different Kubernetes connection, a different Prometheus connection, and the same GitHub connection that is also assigned to the “production” environment.

Deleting an Environment

Deleting an environment does not delete any resources (e.g. connections) currently contained with the environment. Resources that belong to others environments will continue to belong to those other environments. Learn more about the behavior of lifecycle of connections.

Key Features

  • Logical Grouping Environments allow you to logically group related connections and their associated credentials. This makes it easier to manage, share, and work with a subset of resources instead of dealing with all your connections individually.

  • Resource Sharing Environments can be seamlessly assigned to Workspaces, another essential concept in Meshery. When you assign an Environment to a Workspace, you enable resource sharing among team members. This collaborative approach simplifies the sharing of connections and resources, making it easier to work together in cloud-native environments.

Connections and Credentials as Resources

Connections

Connections are an integral part of Environment. These are cloud-native resources that can be both managed and unmanaged, and they’re registered by the Meshery Server. Examples of connections include Kubernetes clusters, Prometheus instances, Jaeger tracers, and Nginx web servers.

See “Connections” section for more information.

Credentials

Credentials in an Environment are the keys to securely authenticate and access managed connections. For example, valid Prometheus secrets or Kubernetes API tokens are essential credentials for securely interacting with these managed resources.

See “Credentials” section for more information.

Environment Lifecycle

Environments in Meshery follow a defined lifecycle that helps maintain organization and control over your cloud-native resources:

Creating Environments

  1. Create environments through Meshery UI or via mesheryctl
  2. Give your environment a meaningful name and description
  3. Optionally add tags for better organization
  4. Start assigning connections and credentials

Managing Environments

  • Add or remove connections and credentials as needed
  • Monitor the health and status of resources within the environment
  • Configure environment-specific settings and policies
  • Share environments by assigning them to workspaces

Environment States

Environments can exist in different states:

  • Active: Environment is created and ready for use
  • Empty: Environment exists but has no connections assigned
  • Archived: Environment is preserved but not actively used
  • Deleted: Environment is removed but contained resources persist

Best Practices

  • Use clear naming conventions for environments (e.g., “prod”, “staging”, “dev”)
  • Document the purpose and contents of each environment
  • Regularly review and clean up unused environments
  • Implement consistent tagging across environments
  • Maintain separation between production and non-production environments

Environment Security

Meshery implements several security measures for environments:

  • Access control through workspace permissions
  • Credential encryption for sensitive data
  • Audit logging of environment changes
  • Resource isolation between environments

By following these lifecycle and security practices, you can maintain well-organized and secure environments for your cloud-native infrastructure.

Summary

Environments represent a collection of resources in the form of Connections - both of managed and unmanaged Connections. Environment resources are comprised of Connections (and implicitly any Credentials used by those assigned Connections). Create and use environments to organize your connections and credentials into groups, and then make these resources available to you and your teams by assigning environments to Workspaces.