Kinsta's hosting was initially built around having 2 environments, staging and live. One of our number one feature requests was to allow sites the ability have multiple staging environments. This was a major shift in our platform because it was not setup to switch between more than 2 environment contexts. The biggest challenge was ensuring these new environments were working with our GCP infastructure and existing Ansible playbooks. Allowing our existing feature set to move seamlesslessly between multiple contexts became a year long project.

A big part of hosting at Kinsta is the ease of mangaing your wordpress installs and deploying changes to production. With the new multiple environment setup we needed to create a hierarchy that allowed users to cross push staging environments while also retaining the able to be deployed to production.

Creating backups of an envionment allows users to quickly roll back changes when they need too. We wanted to also allow users to restore backups across all of a site's environments. This allows a staging environment to easily be over written by another environments backup and worked on. In case of emergencies a back can be restored to a staging environment, fixed, and deployed.