Ch 5 · Environments & secrets
Lifecycle
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An ephemeral environment with no TTL isn't actually ephemeral.

Two feature branches touching the same schema can't share one persistent staging environment — each gets a throwaway one instead.

Ephemeral environments

Attach a hard TTL — a scheduled cleanup or an automation rule tied to the PR's closure — or it silently becomes permanent.

GKE fleets

One logical grouping applies Config Sync and policy once across every member cluster.

2026 update: Fleet API, Config Sync, Policy Controller, and Connect Gateway all moved into base GKE — no separate Anthos Enterprise license required.