We have several cloud environments that can be spun up and deployed by anyone at the company who needs a "production-like" environment. We built some Slack commands to make it easy for anyone to deploy using a specific git commit.

We do this by building a docker container on every commit and storing it in Quay (1). This also means it's easy for anyone on the team to run one of the docker containers on their computer.

We use Gitlab's release branch flow (2). Our cloud production environment is deployed directly from our master branch. And once a month we cut a stable version of our master branch and release it to our on-premise customers.

Hope this helps!

(1) https://quay.io/ (2) https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/gitlab_flow.html#release-b...