About Environments

An environment is a named group of servers and services to which you can deploy process apps. Each environment has one Application Engine server and one or more other target servers and endpoints.

Environments enable you to define logical groupings of runtime servers. For example, you can separate a group of runtime servers for use in a production environment from the runtime servers used in staging.

In addition to defining a group of servers, an environment stores the history of the process apps that are deployed and promoted to it. The environment also shows the process apps currently running on the Application Engine server.

Each environment contains a host Application Engine instance that is used to restrict access to the environment. For example, a user might be allowed to deploy process apps to a staging environment but restricted from deploying to the production environment.

When you install Application Repository, a Default environment is created with the primary Application Engine. Application Repository uses the primary Application Engine to authenticate Application Repository users. If the primary Application Engine does not authenticate your users using internal SBM passwords (for example, if it uses LDAP to authenticate instead), Application Repository still uses it to determine the privileges that control whether a user can access certain views and perform certain operations.

You can further organize environments into "environments sets". Environment sets are collections of environments to which you deploy process apps and among which you promote process apps. For example, an environment set might include test, staging, and production environments that comprise a single SBM system (and each set uses the same version of SBM). Your company might have multiple environment sets. You name the environment set when you initially create the SBM database in SBM System Administrator. Note that each environment in the environment set requires a different name.