Environment

Understanding Odin environments and how to manage them

An Environment in Odin is an isolated namespace for deploying services. It represents a stage in your development lifecycle and provides logical separation between different deployment contexts.

What is an Environment?

Environments allow you to:

• Deploy the same service to different stages (dev, staging, production)
• Isolate deployments from each other
• Associate services with specific cloud provider accounts
• Manage service lifecycle independently per environment

Environment Properties

Each environment has the following properties:

• Name: Unique identifier (e.g., dev, staging, production)
• Organization ID: The organization that owns the environment
• Provider Accounts: One or more cloud provider accounts associated with the environment
• Provisioning Type: Default provisioning strategy (e.g., kubernetes, ec2)
• Status: Current state (CREATING, READY, DELETING, DELETED)
• Auto-deletion Time: Optional scheduled cleanup for ephemeral environments

Environment Lifecycle

Creating an Environment

Create a new environment using the CLI:

odin create env <env-name> --accounts <account1>,<account2>

Example:

odin create env staging --accounts aws/dev,aws/shared

This creates an environment named "staging" associated with two AWS accounts.

Listing Environments

List all environments you have access to:

odin list env

Filter by provider account:

odin list env --account aws/production

Describing an Environment

Get detailed information about an environment:

odin describe env <env-name>

Filter by service or component:

odin describe env staging --service my-service
odin describe env staging --service my-service --component database

Checking Environment Status

Check the deployment status of an environment:

odin status env <env-name>

Get status for a specific service:

odin status env staging --service my-service

Deleting an Environment

Delete an environment and all its services:

odin delete env <env-name>

Environment States

Environments transition through several states:

Environment Best Practices

Naming Conventions

Use clear, consistent names for environments:

• dev or development: Developer environments
• qa or staging: Testing and QA environments
• prod or production: Production environments
• feature-<name>: Feature-specific ephemeral environments

Multi-Account Strategy

Separate environments by purpose:

# Development environment
odin create env dev --accounts aws/dev-account

# Staging environment (dev + shared services)
odin create env staging --accounts aws/dev-account,aws/shared-services

# Production environment
odin create env prod --accounts aws/prod-account,aws/shared-services

Ephemeral Environments

Create temporary environments for feature branches:

odin create env feature-auth-v2 --accounts aws/dev-account
# ... deploy and test ...
odin delete env feature-auth-v2

Environment Isolation

Environments provide isolation at multiple levels:

1. Resource Isolation: Services in different environments use separate cloud resources
2. Namespace Isolation: Kubernetes deployments use environment-specific namespaces
3. Configuration Isolation: Each environment can have different provisioning configs
4. Access Control: Environments can have different access policies

Examples

Create a Development Environment

odin create env dev --accounts aws/dev

Create a Production Environment with Multiple Accounts

odin create env production \
  --accounts aws/prod-compute,aws/prod-data,aws/shared-services

Check All Services in an Environment

odin status env staging

Output:

Environment: staging
Status: READY

Services:
┌──────────────┬─────────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│ Service      │ Version │ Status     │ Components │
├──────────────┼─────────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│ user-api     │ 1.2.0   │ DEPLOYED   │ 3          │
│ payment-svc  │ 2.0.1   │ DEPLOYED   │ 2          │
│ analytics    │ 1.0.0   │ DEPLOYING  │ 4          │
└──────────────┴─────────┴────────────┴────────────┘

Related Concepts

• Service: Deploy services to environments
• Provisioning: Configure how components are deployed in environments