Resources

A resource is a user-defined construct based on Serena Release Automation's architectural model. Resources aid bookkeeping; inventory is tracked for resources. Resources are created and managed through the user interface.

A resource represents a deployment target–a physical machine, virtual machine, database, J2EE container, and so on. Components are deployed to resources by agents (which are physical processes). Resources generally reside on the same host where its managing agent runs. A host can have more than one resource. If an agent is configured to handle multiple resources, a separate agent process is invoked for each one.

A resource can represent a physical machine, which is the simplest configuration, or a specific target on a machine, such as a database or server. So a host (machine) can have several resources represented on it. In addition, a resource can represent a process distributed over several physical or virtual machines. Finally, environments consist of resources.

To perform a deployment, at least one resource must be defined and (usually) at least one agent. ("Usually" because trivial deployments can be done without an agent.) Typically, each host in a participating environment has an agent running on it to handle the resources located there.

A proxy resource is a resource effected by an agent on a host other than the one where the resource is located. If an agent does not require direct interaction with the file system or with process management on the host, a proxy resource can be used. When a deployment needs to interact with a service exposed on the network (a database or J2EE server, for instance), the interaction can happen from any machine that has access to the networked service.