Scalr Organizational Hierarchy - Best Practices

The #1 question we get asked is “What are the best practices for using Scalr accounts, environments, and workspaces?”

This picture shows the logical organizational model in Scalr:

Working from the bottom up the recommended use of each “scope” is as follows:

Workspace

• A workspace is used to deploy and manage logical sub-divisions of your infrastructure, such as networking, database, K8 clusters, application instances etc.
• Workspace state can be shared to enable the use of shared infrastructure.
• This is where a Terraform run is performed and a state file (and its history) are stored.
• Variables (Terraform and shell) are assigned values to be passed into a run including provider credentials, possibly set at higher scopes.

Environment

• A logical collection of workspaces that are typically used by the same team(s), belong to the same application/function and may have common provider credentials , governance policies, and module registry.
• In an environment you can define VCS provider connections and register modules that will be used across the workspaces.

Account

• Manage team and user access to environments with RBAC.
• Define and configure governance policies for all environments.
• Register modules that are shared by all environments.
• Optionally define provider credentials for each environment (published via shell variables).