One of the first steps to building or migrating a website to the Silverstripe Cloud is setting up a Stack. A Stack can hold one or more websites.
Each Stack consists of at least two environments, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and Production (Prod/Live). ‘Environments’ are copies of a website used for different purposes, such as user acceptance testing, and publicly visible site(s) in production.
• UAT is where final acceptance testing is performed and acts as a staging site for code deployment to Production
• Production is where the publicly accessible copy of your website lives.
UAT and Production are designed to be as similar as possible to each other, to minimise the chance that a difference could cause functionality that operated correctly on UAT to fail on the Live server once deployed there. Some actions on the environments are only permitted by privileged users based on roles and permissions of team members on a Stack.
After you log in you will be shown a list of stacks that you have access to, visible under Stack title or in the left menu under Stacks.
Clicking on one of the Stacks gives you access to all environments associated with it. Each stack will have at least two environments available: Production and UAT. What actions you can perform depends on your permissions (see Roles and Responsibilities).
For Stacks hosted on Silverstripe Cloud's AWS infrastructure, Stacks can be configured in a way to utilise Virtual Stacks. This enables multiple live websites to run on the one Stack, this typically suits digital agencies with multiple smaller sized sites and tight hosting budgets.