Environments

An environment is a logical grouping mechanism for data connections (taps and sinks) that helps you organize and manage your data processing workflows in a structured way. Environments allow you to categorize your data sources and destinations based on their purpose or context, such as Production, Testing, Development, or any custom grouping that makes sense for your organization.

Purpose and Benefits

Environments provide several key benefits:

• Organization: Group related data connections together for easier management
• Context: Clearly identify the purpose or stage of each data connection
• Isolation: Keep different types of data workflows separate from each other
• Filtering: Easily filter and view only the connections relevant to a specific environment

Environment Properties

Each environment has two key properties:

1. Name: A descriptive full name for the environment (e.g., "Production Database")
2. Short Name: A concise abbreviation displayed in tags throughout the UI (e.g., "PROD")

Visual Representation

Environments are visually represented in the UI as blue tags with the environment's short name (e.g., "PROD", "DEV", "TEST"). These tags appear next to data connections to quickly identify their associated environment.

Managing Environments

You can manage environments from the Environments page, which provides:

• A searchable table of all environments in your project
• The ability to create new environments
• Options to edit existing environments
• The option to delete environments (with confirmation)

Creating an Environment

1. Navigate to the Environments page
2. Click the "Create" button
3. Enter a descriptive name (e.g., "Production")
4. Enter a short name (e.g., "PROD")
5. Save the new environment

Assigning Connections to Environments

When creating or editing taps and sinks, you can assign them to specific environments. This association helps organize your data connections and makes it easier to work with them in context.

Recommended Usage

We recommend using environments to:

1. Separate production, staging, and development data connections
2. Group connections by client, department, or business unit
3. Organize connections by data sensitivity level (PII, non-PII, etc.)
4. Create custom groupings that match your workflow needs

This approach helps maintain a clean, organized interface and makes it easier to manage complex data processing projects.