About environments

Environments in CloudGate Key Manager consist of a logical grouping of server instances, and typically correspond to the environments that exist in your infrastructure (e.g. development environment, staging environment, production environment, etc.).

Environments can contain instances that are hosted locally, instances that are operated by a cloud service provider, or a combination of both. They can optionally be linked to one or more cloud accounts to automatically retrieve instance information.

Environments are either managed manually or automatically, and can be used in policies to restrict access to instances belonging to a specific environment.

Manually managed environments

Manually managed environments are environments where instances are explicitly added and removed by an administrator. When linked to one or more cloud accounts, instance information will still be updated automatically.

Automatically managed environments

Automatically managed environments are environments where instances are automatically added and removed based on information retrieved from one or more linked cloud accounts. The decision of whether or not an instance is added to an automatically managed environment, is governed by the presence of an administrator-defined tag or label on the instance. As such, the administrator adds and removes instances in an automatically managed environment by adding, editing or removing tags or labels on the respective instances.