Blueprint Management

Architect Away!

Adding Blueprints

While on the environment details page, you can add blueprints using the ➕ in the upper-right corner of the panel titled "blueprints". When adding a blueprint, the latest version is always selected. You can modify the version to use after adding it. After you add a blueprint, you may need to set variable values for the blueprint to be viable for provisioning.

Once a blueprint is added to an environment, it makes the environment stale and will need to be applied.

How Blueprints Merge

When multiple blueprints are present in an environment, they are expected to fit together like puzzle pieces. If a resource is referenced but not declared in one blueprint, it must be provided by another blueprint. The combination of all the blueprints together must be a valid, compliant schema. If one blueprint provides a folder and none of the other blueprints do, all of the resources end up in that folder due to folder inferencing.

Blueprint Merge

Modifying Blueprints

Blueprint authors will design, test, and then publish updates to their blueprints using Development Mode. In development mode, an environment is allowed to use blueprint drafts. When you want to make changes to a blueprint and then test those changes, you do so in development mode.

Development mode environments are typically clones of regular environments. For example, a regular (or production) environment is used to assemble published blueprints, while a development environment can be used to make changes to one or more blueprints, test those changes, and then publish updated versions of the blueprints. When a blueprint version is published, all environments are notified of the availability of an update to that blueprint, and the environment operator can decide whether or not to upgrade to the latest version of the blueprint.

Blueprint Development Workflow

The tutorial has a great example of how to leverage a development environment to preflight draft changes.

Removing Blueprints

While on the environment details page, you can remove blueprints from the environment using the remove action icon. When you next apply the environment, the unnecessary resources from that blueprint are removed and then the blueprint disappears from the environment, along with any variables associated with it.