Environments and Promotion

Development, UAT and production are three universes. Each is its own apply of the same Terraform, with its own variables and its own identity provider client.

That is the whole story for infrastructure, and it is what the contract exists for.

Promotion is three separate movements

Treating it as one button is how environments drift. It is three, and they move at different speeds.

Infrastructure does not move. Each environment is provisioned independently from the same module, so production is not a copy of UAT, it is another instance of the same definition.

The platform version moves as an image tag. UAT runs a tag first and production follows it. This requires pinned tags rather than a floating latest, so that “production runs what UAT tested” is a fact rather than a hope.

Authored assets move by publishing. Components, templates, skills and prompt blocks are rows in a universe’s database, and promoting one means publishing it to the next universe. That is the same mechanism a developer uses from Studio, pointed at a different address.

What never moves

Data stays where it is. Conversations, memory, traces and credentials are properties of an environment, not of a release.

Secrets are re-entered in production. They are never copied forward, because a secret that has been in a test environment is a test secret.

A gap worth knowing about

Workflows have no promotion lane. Components, skills and nodes are all publishable items with a version history. Workflows are not, so moving one from UAT to production today means rebuilding it on the production canvas.

This is a known limitation rather than a design position, and closing it is required work for real multi-environment operation. Plan around it if your process depends on promoting workflows rather than rebuilding them.

Day-two operations

Once a universe is running, the routine work is small and each piece has a runbook.

Platform upgrades	Pull new image tags and restart
Database migrations	Run against a live universe, forward only
Rolling back	Images roll back. Migrations do not, by design
Node inventory	Reconcile the database against what is installed
Backups	Provider-native, plus the Spatial ML models and the credential encryption key
Publish keys	Issued on the box, for CI and for first connection
Resizing	Change the size variable, apply, redeploy

Content does not appear in that list, and that is the point. Assets reach a universe by publishing and nodes install themselves from the record in the database, so neither one requires a deployment.

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Next: Runbooks