This blog post provides perspective on the term environment as it is used in content management systems, specifically the Contentstack SaaS Headless CMS. This post is a member of the following glossary:
In the context of content management, the term environment can refer to:
- the difference between development, test, and production environments common to any system.
- the difference between content management and content delivery environments specific to CMS systems.
In the first sense of the term environment, development and testing use non-production content management and content delivery environments. An organization could use development, integration test, user acceptance testing, staging, and other non-production environments. Invalid data and other failures of these environments should not impact production content management or content delivery, which are in a separate environment.
In the second sense of the term environment, CMS users publish changes from a production content management environment to a production content delivery environment and possibly to other content delivery environments, such as staging.
In other words, CMS users publish from the content management system in the production environment (in the first sense) to one or more content delivery environments (in the second sense). Content delivery systems retrieve data from content delivery environments (in the second sense) in the appropriate environment (in the first sense).
In Contentstack, the term environment refers specifically to a content delivery facility (the second sense), meaning that it is a target for content publishing operations.
Deliverystack.net 
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