Represents the Quality Assurance Environment, used for integration testing, user acceptance testing, and pre-production validation. Purpose: Ensures release candidates meet functional and non-functional requirements. Rationale: Creates a controlled environment for validating deployments prior to production release. Type: Infrastructure (Container Orchestration) Role: Executes the Supplier microservice container workloads. Purpose: Provides scalable execution, service discovery, networking, and lifecycle management for the Supplier service using Kubernetes control plane primitives.