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An environment defines the connection between a project and your chosen cloud data warehouse. Environments include useful defaults—such as a default warehouse, database, and schema—that can be used to pre-populate component configurations in . Haven’t added a project yet? Read Google BigQuery projects.
We recommend using environments to separate your development and production environments:
  • Use development environments for building, testing, and iterating on pipelines before they are deployed.
  • Use production environments to run pipelines that are fully deployed to work on live data. Only stable and thoroughly tested pipelines should be deployed here.
  • You can also use intermediate environments, such as staging, test, or preprod, to validate pipelines before they are deployed to production. These can also be used for performance testing.
For more information, read our Unlocking Data Productivity DataOps guide.

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Prerequisites

Before adding a new environment, make sure a Google Cloud credential is configured in the project. You can then choose whether to use the project-level credential or specify an environment-level value.

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Add an environment

This tab lists all environments in your project. Follow these steps if you’ve already created a BigQuery project.
  1. In your project, click the Environments tab.
  2. Click Add environment.
The available options for adding a new environment depend on your project configuration.

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Specify GCP cloud credentials

You are required to provide the following GCP cloud credentials:Click Continue.

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Use project defaults

If you selected Use project defaults on the previous screen, use this section to create a new environment.

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Create an environment

Click Continue.

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Select BigQuery defaults

Click Finish.You will return to the Environments tab in the project’s menu. From here, you can view your:

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Override for this environment

If you selected Override for this environment on the previous screen, use this section to select your Google BigQuery defaults.

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Select BigQuery defaults

Click Finish.You will return to the Environments tab in the project’s menu. From here, you can view your:

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Associate cloud provider credentials with an environment

Each environment in your project should have at least one set of cloud credentials associated with it. This allows you to access account resources on different platforms other than that hosting your project. For example, if your project is on AWS and you want to access resources in Azure, you need to associate your Azure cloud credentials with the environment. Credentials are configured at the project level and apply to selected environments within the project. They can then be used by any pipelines that use those environments. To create and associate cloud credentials, read Cloud provider credentials.

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Edit or remove an associated credential

Edit or remove which credential is in use by your environment:
  • Hybrid SaaS: Removing the credential causes the environment to fall back to runner-assigned credentials.
  • Full SaaS: Removing the credential leaves the environment unusable, because Full SaaS environments require an explicitly associated credential.

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Manage environments

To view your environments:
  1. From the Your projects menu, select your project.
  2. Navigate to the Environments tab.
Click the column headers to sort your environments by name, default , cloud data warehouse account name, or credential type.

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Edit an environment

The edit environment screen only allows you to edit default values for your Google Cloud project and dataset.
  1. Click the three dots … in the row of the environment you want to edit.
  2. Click Edit environment.
  3. On the Edit Google BigQuery credentials, use the Runner drop-down to choose a different runner for your environment.
  4. Use the Default environment access drop-down to choose a different default role for your environment. For more information, read Environment roles.
  5. Click Continue to move to the next screen, where you can use the drop-down menus to update your BigQuery defaults.
  6. Click Update to return to the Environments tab in your project.
If you disable the Allow inherit project defaults toggle on the BigQuery defaults screen, the environment will not inherit project-level defaults. You must manually provide a default value for each variable within the environment to ensure pipelines function successfully across different environments.
To edit the Associate credentials of your environment, you can edit or remove which credential is being used by your environment. For Hybrid SaaS deployments, removing a credential effectively means to use Use runner-assigned credentials. For a Full SaaS deployment, removing credentials will result in your environment being unusable.

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Delete an environment

Deleting an environment permanently removes the environment from your project. All artifacts and schedules in the deleted environment will be inaccessible. This action cannot be undone.
Before you delete an environment, you must:
  • Disable any active schedules that run pipelines in this environment.
  • Change the default environment of any branches that currently use this environment as their default. For more information, read Branches.
To delete an environment:
  1. Click the three dots … in the row of the environment you want to delete.
  2. Click Delete environment.
  3. In the confirmation dialog, enter the name of the environment you want to delete.
  4. Click Delete environment.