What's the intrinsic way to represent environments in Kong Konnect?

I've Googled many different combinations of terms to find out what concepts and features Kong Konnect expects sysadmins to use to represent different environments (e.g. staging, production) and tenants (e.g. US, Canada), to no avail.

The only documentation I can find (from Kong themselves) suggests the use of multiple runtime groups, but this requires an Enterprise subscription; this seems overkill to me given that having this ilk of environment separation is a very common pattern used by many companies, small and big alike.

The only other way I could see this working is by avoiding associating upstream URLs in the Service Hub, and instead making use of one Gateway Service per environment (e.g. public-api-staging, public-api-production) within a single Runtime Group, and rules to route to those.

Are my assumptions about the intended usage pattern of Kong Konnect incomplete or incorrect here, or is this indeed a limitation of their pricing strategy?

Kong Konnect provides multiple ways to represent environments, but the most intrinsic way is to use runtime groups to isolate different environments. However, this feature is only available for Kong Konnect Enterprise subscribers.

An alternative approach would be to use separate Gateway Services within a single Runtime Group and rules to route to them. While this may work, it may not provide the same level of isolation as using separate runtime groups.

Overall, the intended usage pattern of Kong Konnect may not be limited to just one approach, and different companies may choose different strategies based on their specific needs and budget.