Environments and instances

An environment is a deploy target the tenant creates explicitly on a connected account. Provisioning it installs the environment's own data-plane-core stack — config store, event bus, KMS — tagged swb:env. Two environments can share one account as separate stacks; brownfield environments adopt existing resources by CloudFormation import. A protected environment (production) gates every deploy behind an approval.

An instance is app × environment — the unit everything else hangs off:

• Version and latest. What runs, and the head of the channel the instance follows. status: upgrade means they differ.
• Landed pins. Component versions read from stack outputs after the last deploy.
• Endpoints. The web app, API, dev portal and sites discovered from the stack.
• Scope and audience. Which containers' data it serves, and which identity accounts may log in.

Deploying an instance is one mutation on the GraphQL API — answered by a deploy-dispatcher execution that drives CloudFormation to completion and reads the stack back.