Magento 2 CE – ElasticSearch Integration Guide

From what I've gathered at the sessions and demos with the Cloud booth at Imagine 2016, you can use any tools and processes you want to use. If you already have processes implemented, they should not need to change (much).

The way the solution was presented was that you have a master git repo and within the web UI supplied by Platform.sh you create as many branches as you need. So you can have a branch for staging, and a branch for development. Then under those branches, you can have as many branches as you have features. It's a one-click deployment of a replica of the production system for your one feature. Each branch generates, at that time, a new environment which replicates the production environment.

So you do your code development after creating a branch within the new Platform.sh web UI and commit your code to that branch. Once it's passed your tests, you push up to the remote and your branch environment has the new code deployed to it (possibly through the web UI or done through git hooks). Each environment has a unique URL which you can then use to review that specific feature's changes.

The platform is proprietary; however, they have done as much as possible to make it as flexible as can be. The recipes used for creating deployments can be edited by you. There is also an easy way to add/remove environment variables for scripts so you can change the database credentials or sanitize all the data in the database if need be on each deployment.

I will be trying to make an answer quite simple for you to see through Magento a bit more fluently. (background, there is a lot of documentation and a couple of sentences may guide you to understand what is what..)

Magento is an e-commerce framework (php code and connect to mysql).

In steps:

1. you may deploy this framework with simple data (in this process, you do have to setup a webserver indeed)
2. you have at this point an ecommerce website that you can use: purchase items and create customer and so on (I understand this is not something you are interested but just to make it clear, this is what most people use Magento for). Also, anybody using this site will be able to create orders, register as a new customer like we do onto a site. By doing this the sample data are modified and your API queries can have different returned data
3. finally, with just setting up the API (add an API user in the backend for querying some Magento API with a token), you have now access to all the Magento API to gather the data that the website host in its mysql database

--> you can create as many API users as you want and each can have different privileges (access different API)

--> the data that you will receive from these API calls will be the data in your mysql database and therefore will be the data related to the sample data (2k products, 1 customer and 2 orders are the content pretty much of the sample data)

I hope this clarify your situation. I don't see what you call "your users' own Magento data" and therefore I hope you see now that the data in the Magento API are only reflecting the e-commerce data you have in your site.