DataONE infrastructure environments

In addition to the production environment that the end user sees when interacting with DataONE services, DataONE maintains several other independent environments for development and testing. These environments emulate the production environment and allow developing and testing of DataONE components without affecting the production environment.

Each environment is a set of Coordinating Nodes (CNs) along with a set of Member Nodes (MNs) that are registered to those CNs. Each environment maintain sets of content, formats, and DataONE identities independent of each other. By registering a MN to an environment, you enable content to synchronize with the CNs, and be replicated to other nodes in the same environment.

Since there are no connections between the environments, information registered in one environment - certificates, DataONE identities, and formats - cannot be carried over into another environment.

The environments are:

Environment	URL	Description
Production	https://cn.dataone.org	Stable production environment for use by the public.
Staging	https://cn-stage.test.dataone.org	Testing of release candidates.
Sandbox	https://cn-sandbox.test.dataone.org	Like Production, but open to test instances of MNs. May contain both test and real science objects.
Development	https://cn-dev.test.dataone.org	Unstable components under active development.

The Production environment is only used by completed MNs that hold production quality data.

If a MN is under development or if it is experimental in nature, for instance, if the purpose is to learn more about the DataONE infrastructure or if the MN will be populated with objects that may not be of production quality, one of the test environments should be used.

To register a Member Node into an environment, follow the steps in Node Registration.