Staging environment¶

Mirantis recommends creating a staging environment for any production purposes. Thus, a typical MCP installation should consist of at least two clusters of the same kind (OpenStack or Kubernetes): for staging and production.

Mirantis recommends you install the staging environment first and reuse as much as possible of the Reclass cluster model of the staging environment to deploy production environment(s). Having a staging environment with a control plane topology that differs from the production environment is considered impractical.

Consider installing a staging environment for your production environment if:

• You will run mission-critical workloads in your production environment.
• You plan to install more than one production environment in the same or similar topology.
• You plan to develop custom components or integrate an external service with MCP.

In any case, the staging environment provides you with a testing sandbox to test any changes in configuration or versions of artifacts before you apply it to your production environment.