Shoot Cluster Purpose

The Shoot resource contains a .spec.purpose field indicating how the shoot is used, whose allowed values are as follows:

evaluation (default): Indicates that the shoot cluster is for evaluation scenarios.
development: Indicates that the shoot cluster is for development scenarios.
testing: Indicates that the shoot cluster is for testing scenarios.
production: Indicates that the shoot cluster is for production scenarios.
infrastructure: Indicates that the shoot cluster is for infrastructure scenarios (only allowed for shoots in the garden namespace).

Behavioral Differences

The following enlists the differences in the way the shoot clusters are set up based on the selected purpose:

testing shoot clusters do not get a monitoring or a logging stack as part of their control planes.
production shoot clusters get at least two replicas of the kube-apiserver for their control planes. Auto-scaling scale down of the main ETCD is disabled for such clusters.

There are also differences with respect to how testing shoots are scheduled after creation, please consult the Scheduler documentation.

We might introduce more behavioral difference depending on the shoot purpose in the future. As of today, there are no plans yet.