Hi! I wanted to share some feedback from using the Environments feature, along with Environment groups, and managing the workflow with Blueprint.
Our infrastructure currently consists of 4 different Environments: Development, Staging, Production, and Demo. Resources for all these environments (plus auxiliary functions) are defined in our render.yaml. As an aside, we generate this file using some Python + Jinja2 to ensure we get the same configuration across environments, with minor differences.
The introduction of the Environments feature has been useful as a way to group resources by the respective environment. However, there are to notable frustrations
- (Smaller issue) It seems there is no way to assign a particular resource to an Environment via a Blueprint (though they can be assigned manually Projects and Environments – Render Docs). This is somewhat annoying, but workable.
- (Bigger issue) If an Environment Group is assigned to an Environment, adding a service (e.g. background worker) that references that EG fails as the Environment Group is in an Environment, but the Service cannot be defined to be part of that group.
The second items means we have to go through and disassociate each Environment Group from each Environment, then perform the sync, then manually re-associate each Environment Group.
(Also, while going through this exercise I opened each Environment Group in a separate tab so I could cycle through all of them for each pass. There’s a small bug where, after removing an EG from an Environment, you can’t add it back until you refresh page state).
Coming from a world of managing resources with Terraform and Kubernetes manifests I’ve found the Blueprint IaC approach to be a bit lacking in capability.
Overall I’ve found Render to generally be a useful balance of complexity and features, but I wanted to share this feedback as it’s what I’d also appreciate getting from end users 
