environment

ArchiMate 3.2 Equivalent: Location / Technology Node (Technology Layer)

Represents a physical or cloud hosting realm, such as an AWS account, Azure subscription, Kubernetes cluster namespace, VPC, or environment stage (e.g. Production, Staging).

An environment entity can contain child infrastructure nodes.

Visual Styling

To apply custom styles, icons, or borders to environments, use a Style Rule (e.g. style environment where is_production == true { css_class "prod-env-border" }).

---

Syntax

environment <id> "<Display Name>" {
    description "<text>"
    owner "<team>"
    tags ["tag1", "tag2"]
    env_type "<type>"
    region "<cloud_region>"
    is_production true | false
    provider "<cloud_provider>"

    # Child Infrastructure
    infrastructure <infra_id> "<Infra Name>" { ... }

    relationships { ... }
}

---

Properties

Property	Type	Allowed Values	Description
description	string	Free text	Explanation of the environment scope
owner	string	Free text	Platform or SRE team accountable
tags	string[]	Array of strings	Categorization tags
env_type	string	e.g. "Production", "Staging", "Disaster-Recovery"	Environment tier
region	string	e.g. "us-east-1", "ap-southeast-2"	Geographical deployment location
is_production	boolean	true | false	Production environment flag
provider	string	e.g. "AWS", "Azure", "GCP", "On-Premises"	Cloud or hosting provider

---

Allowed Relationship Verbs & Targets

Verb	ArchiMate Relation	Allowed Target Entity Types
composed_of	Composition	infrastructure
hosts	Assignment / Hosting	system, app, component, agent
migrates_to	Transformation	system, app, component, infrastructure, environment
governed_by	Governance	policy, standard

---

Complete Example

environment env_aws_prod "AWS Production Account" {
    description "Primary multi-AZ production AWS account in US-East"
    env_type "Production"
    region "us-east-1"
    provider "AWS"
    is_production true
    tags ["cloud", "pci-scoped"]

    infrastructure infra_eks_cluster "EKS Core Cluster" {
        description "Managed Kubernetes compute fleet"
    }

    relationships {
        this hosts sys_payment_gateway "Hosts live payment processing workloads"
        this governed_by pol_cloud_security "Enforces CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark"
    }
}