Promoting a Design from Staging to Prod

This guide walks through how Five promotes the prod-deployment-v2 design from the orbital-staging workspace to orbital-production, then deploys it to the prod-aws environment.

Promotion is a move. A design lives in at most one workspace, so assigning it to production removes it from staging. There is no approval step and no copy.

See Meet Five and the Cast for the full Orbital Labs narrative reference.

Overview 🔗

At Orbital Labs, workspaces mirror the deployment pipeline. A workspace decides where a design lives and which teams can read which connections. An environment is the deploy target. A team assignment gives read-only access to connections. It does not give access to designs.

Five has finished validating prod-deployment-v2 in staging. The design deploys an EKS cluster, an RDS PostgreSQL database, an S3 bucket, and a CloudFront distribution, the core of Orbital Labs’ AWS production platform.

Every member of the organization can already see both workspaces. Visibility is organization-wide. What a workspace grants comes from the teams and environments assigned to it.

Prerequisites 🔗

• You have a design ready in a staging workspace that has been tested.
• You hold Assign Designs to Workspaces in the production workspace’s organization. That is the only permission Layer5 Cloud checks for the move. You do not also need access to the workspace the design leaves.
• The production workspace has at least one environment assigned with the target cloud connections.
• To deploy, you run a Meshery Server that holds the cluster connection. The hosted kanvas.new site does not deploy designs.

Steps 🔗

Step 1: Open the design in staging 🔗

1. Navigate to Layer5 Cloud and open the orbital-staging workspace.
2. Find prod-deployment-v2 in the designs assigned to that workspace.
3. Open the design and confirm it is in the expected state, with components connected and no validation errors.

The staging team cannot open a private design just because the team is assigned to the workspace. Five can open it because Five owns it.

Step 2: Transfer the design to the production workspace 🔗

Designs belong to at most one workspace at a time. To promote the design, move it.

1. On the orbital-production workspace, open Designs/Views.
2. Select prod-deployment-v2 from the designs you own that are not already in that workspace.
3. Move it into orbital-production and save.

Step 3: Select the target environment 🔗

With prod-deployment-v2 now in orbital-production, deploy it from Kanvas.

1. Open the design in Kanvas.
2. Click Deploy and select the target environment, in this case prod-aws.
3. Review the connection list: EKS cluster, RDS (PostgreSQL), S3, CloudFront, SQS.

The deploy action offers environments from the organization’s whole list at the moment you deploy. It does not limit the list to the design’s workspace, so select prod-aws yourself. See Deploying Designs.

The workspace decided where the design lives. The environment you choose decides where it runs.

Step 4: Verify the deployment 🔗

1. Open the orbital-production workspace’s recent activity.
2. Confirm the log lists the design assignment, with the email address of the person who moved it. Reading the log requires the View Workspace permission.
3. In Kanvas, confirm the deploy to prod-aws completed for the connections you selected.

What’s Next 🔗

• The production team can read the production connections but still cannot open a private design. To give Rex or Jordan access, share the design with each of them. See Sharing a Workspace.
• To deploy the same design to prod-gcp, repeat the deploy and select prod-gcp. Do not copy the design.
• To roll back, assign prod-deployment-v2 to orbital-staging again. It leaves production the same way it left staging.

Related Reading

• Sharing a Workspace
• Publishing to Catalog
• Building a GCP Data Pipeline Design
• Collaborative Editing
• Cross-Org Design Access: stellar-saas-platform
• Deploy AWS EC2 Instances with Meshery

Related Videos

Publishing Designs

Previous Next