The public cloud infrastructure offers infinite scalability, allowing teams to cope with events like Black Friday and spin up new environments as needed. However, many teams are stuck with dev and staging environments due to environment-specific configs built into the code. The most problematic approach is to build different containers for each environment, violating testing setup integrity and requiring repeated tests for production versions. Another approach is to hardwire configuration in one large config file, limiting the number of environments. Environment variables provide a simple solution to unlock full ad-hoc environment potential, externalizing configs and enabling easy manipulation whenever a new environment is needed. By using environment variables, teams can keep important configurations separate from application code, ensuring flexibility and efficiency in continuous delivery and container-based applications.