It’s inevitable that the number of environments will grow. Therefore, you must occasionally review your environment catalog to remove unused environments, update active ones, and consolidate wherever possible. Depending on the size of your organization and your use of Domino, this might be a yearly or quarterly task.
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In the Admin application, go to Manage resources > Environments.
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Sort the table by the # of Projects column to get a quick understanding of which environments are in common use.
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Click the name of an environment to see its Dockerfile details.
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Click the Projects and Models tabs to see the list of projects and models using the environment. The list also includes the date of the last run for each project and model.
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Watch for environments that make duplicate changes to global base environments, as well as unused or poorly-maintained environments.
After you review existing environments, you must plan an updated set of global environments that include the tools and features frequently added by users. It might be as easy as adding a few packages to an existing global environment. You can also create a new global environment when necessary, but Domino recommends erring on the side of larger, more consolidated environments. Doing so makes it easier for your users to choose an environment. It will also be easier for you to manage and maintain the collection of environments in your deployment.
Before you execute your plan and change the available global environments, inform your users of the impending changes and solicit their feedback. Explain the changes to existing environments, announce when you create new ones, and provide recommendations for which environment to use for various projects.
When necessary, you must sunset Environments that are deprecated or no longer used. You can archive these Environments as long as they are not currently set as the Project Default Environment for any Projects.
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Tip
| An alternative to archiving Environments is to rename them to indicate that they are End-of-Life. |
Archiving an Environment does the following:
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Removes it from the Environments menu so users can no longer select it.
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Encourages adoption of new, up-to-date, and consolidated Environments.
It is important to note the following about archived Environments:
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Historical runs still reference archived Environments, so archiving does not break reproducibility.
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Environments can be unarchived if necessary.