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Glean Standard Staging Requirements

A staging environment is an additional pre‑production Glean environment that runs a slightly newer Glean product build than the build installed in a customer's production environment, so a customer can do user acceptance testing (UAT) and/or regression testing before code is promoted to their production environment, typically for testing integrations.

Staging is a premium option for a small set of Enterprise / Strategic customers. However, most customers who need additional controls for rolling out new functionality may be better served by managed rollouts in production.

Customer responsibilities​

To purchase, maintain and support a standard staging environment, the customer must:

  • Have Premium Glean Support
  • Run a timely UAT on staging
    • Have a team and/or automation that validates each staging release within 7 days.
    • Agree that Glean will not hold production indefinitely pending UAT sign‑off.
  • Stay close to the current Glean build
    • Keep staging and production within 4 weeks of the current Glean GA release.
    • Acknowledge that if they are more than 4 weeks behind, Glean may:
      • Suspend product support for that environment, and/or
      • Require an upgrade before continuing support; and/or
      • Not be responsible for any obligations or liabilities to the extent caused by a customer’s failure to timely upgrade to the current build
    • Understand that security scans/fixes apply to the latest GA version only and are not guaranteed to be backported to older versions.
  • Provide Glean log and emergency access
    • Staging environment
      • Must be set to AC_LOW with access to operational logs
      • Access for Emergency Access scenarios (e.g., stuck instances, misconfigured permissions). In case of any failure, a Glean CIE (Cloud Infra Eng) will be notified and take over the failed release deploys, and attempt to resolve the issue. If the Glean CIE is unable to resolve it independently, s/he will contact the customer’s production contact.
    • Product environments must give the Glean service account access to:
      • View operational logs
      • Recommended: Customer gives Glean access to Production for “Emergency Access” scenarios. Glean will, in turn, maintain clear communication for such access as per the customer’s need. If not, the customer's production contact must respond within one business day to resolve production issues.
  • Provide a responsive staging and production contact
    • Designate a production contact (email and/or Slack) for staging/production issues that will respond within 1 business day to unblock deployments or resolve critical issues.
  • Customer’s Production release will lag behind the most recent public GA build, and customers must correlate this lag with all applicable release notes, fixes, and available betas.

Standard Staging Limitations​

The standard staging SKU is intentionally narrow. If additional configuration is required, the customer must purchase a different product.

By choosing this SKU, the customer agrees that:

  • Standard automated weekly release only
    • Releases follow a pre‑defined weekly window during which
      • Staging gets the new candidate build, and
      • Production gets the build already soaked in staging
      • These will happen on the same day
    • Changes to the window are limited (e.g., up to 2 times per year) and may not exceed the 4‑week lag limit between Glean’s current version and the customer’s production code base.
  • No bespoke per‑feature rollout behavior
    • Customers must use in‑product managed rollouts, admin controls, and segmentation for feature gating.
    • Glean will not:
      • Maintain long‑lived, per‑feature exceptions for a single customer, or
      • Run separate “tracks” for each feature outside the standard managed rollout.
  • No ongoing per‑customer cherry‑picks
    • Glean will not cherry‑pick specific features or fixes only for one customer’s staging/production.
    • Exception: Glean may cherry‑pick P0 security or critical performance fixes in exceptional situations, at Glean’s discretion
  • No indefinite blocking of GA
    • Staging cannot be used to freeze a customer on older releases indefinitely or permanently block generally available features.
    • If the customer’s process requires open‑ended control over promotion, they are not a fit for the standard staging SKU.
  • No guarantee of full corpus mirroring in Staging
    • Staging is for functional / integration testing, not for a full, always‑identical copy of production.
    • Glean may use scoped (“greenlisted”) crawls in staging when:
      • API rate limits or costs make full mirroring impractical.
  • Not a DR / backup solution
    • Staging is not a disaster‑recovery, archival, or backup environment.
    • It has a limited lifespan tied to current Glean releases and the 4‑week lag policy.
  • If a customer needs any of the following, they must purchase a different product for advanced deployment configurations that may cover items such as…
    • Full customer‑controlled promotion from staging to production.
    • Tight integration with their own change‑management systems and bespoke approval flows for each release.
    • Restricted access models that prevent Glean from getting the required logs or performing standard Emergency Access.
    • More complex deployment topologies or special security/compliance configurations beyond what is described above.
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