About Environments

Environments represent a set of resources to which turnovers may be deployed. Environments manage and give visibility into the scheduling of maintenance and other events in environments, flagging any scheduling conflicts. Environments are linked to Release Automation environments. Turnovers are scheduled into environments in the turnovers' deployment paths.

The Environment process app includes two applications: Environment and Environment Schedule. The Environment Schedule application includes the Environment Schedules and Path Elements workflows. The applications and their workflows are described in the following sections:

Environment

Environment Schedule

Path Elements

Environment

The primary application in the Environment process app is Environment.

Participants:

Release engineers
Release manager

Release engineers typically own environments.

Release engineers and release managers can do the following from environments:

Create and link to Release Automation environments.
Schedule maintenance or other events and decommission environments as needed. This blocks out periods of time when turnovers cannot be scheduled for the environments.
Decommission environments that are no longer needed.

Process Phases:

Environments follow a process organized into these phases:

Provision
Environment items are created. Each environment must be owned by a release engineer.
Active
Environments are placed online, signaling that scheduling can take place for turnovers, maintenance windows, and other environment events, such as events for release trains.
Inactive
The environment owner can take environments offline for maintenance and return them back online when maintenance is complete.

Note:

Environment data is synchronized from Release Manager to Release Automation, but changes made to environments in Release Automation are not synchronized back to Release Manager.
Putting environments online in Release Manager has no affect on linked Release Automation environments. These must be placed online in Release Automation before you can deploy to their associated resources.
Putting environments online is informational only; you are not prohibited from scheduling a turnover into an offline environment.

Environment Schedule

The Environment Schedule application implements the environment scheduling process.

When an event is scheduled for an environment, the scheduled event has to go through an approval process. If you schedule the environment in a time period that overlaps, you'll get an error. The error is highlighted on the schedule and notifications go to those subscribed.

The Environment Schedule application manages the following:

Maintenance Events: You can schedule a maintenance event during a period of time the environment is being initialized, upgraded, or otherwise maintained. This blocks the environment from being scheduled for a turnover or other events.
Other Events: You can schedule other types of events in addition to maintenance events; the other event has no limitations on it, in that it can be used for any type of event that you need to schedule, such as environment provisioning.
Conflicting Events: You cannot schedule more than one maintenance event into overlapping timeframes; if you try, you'll get a message in the form with the schedule conflict highlighted.
Schedule Approvals: You can have approvals for the environment schedule either through the Environment Pending Requests tab or emails. You can approve, reject, reschedule, update, or delete.
Rescheduling: When you reschedule, you can either set the schedule then, or mark it to set the schedule later. You have to start and finish maintenance using the corresponding options.
Event Status: The status of the scheduled events are shown on the schedule calendar.
Scheduled Turnovers: When you have scheduled a turnover into an environment, those will show on the schedule calendar as well.

Process Phases:

Environment schedules follow a process organized into these phases:

Schedule
Environment schedule items are created. The environment schedule is owned by the submitter or a release engineer.

If approvals are required, the environment schedule item must be approved by a release engineer or release manager.
Active
The environment schedule is started.

When the environment item leaves the deployment state in the workflow, the environment schedule is completed.
Inactive
The environment schedule is complete.

Path Elements

The Path Elements workflow is implemented in the Environment Schedule application.

The individual environment items in a deployment path are stored in the Path Elements project. The path element items act as templates and are not associated with a specific turnover. When a deployment path is used in a turnover, duplicates are made of these path element items and associated with the specific turnover. The new items are created in the Environment Schedules project.

Related Topics

Creating Environments

About Deployment Paths

Configuring and Deploying Turnovers