Regarding the environment config files (/*.yml), are these configured automatically or manually? At what point are they created if automatic?
Just looking through the settings in public.yml alone, I notice there are settings unique to some environments and settings common to most. Is there a reference for these settings? I see many references to s3 in the existing configurations - I assume it's not required to use the Amazon cloud.
One common example we point people to is this setup or this one, both of which are smaller on-prem hosted systems. You definitely do not need to rely on AWS or any other web services. We have a few different back-ends available for Object storage, including a file system option, RiakCS, and AWS.
Currently we build these files mostly by hand, generally based on our previous examples. There are a few commands available in the core cloud toolkit to help inspect and validate your environment files.