Managing Resources

A resource is a deployment target, such as the agent itself, or a subcategory managed by the agent, such as a database or J2EE container. Resources are usually found on the same host where the agent that manages them is located. A host can be a physical machine, virtual machine, or be cloud-based.

An example production pipeline might be System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and production (PROD), where the application passes through two testing environments before reaching production. In this scenario, at least three agents need to be installed, one per environment. If different components run on different machines within a given environment, you may want to install multiple agents in that environment.

Whether you need one or multiple resources per environment is determined by your current infrastructure, deployment procedures, and other requirements. Many Deployment Automation users have significant differences among environments; in SIT you might need to deploy a component to one machine, while in UAT you might need to deploy the component to multiple machines.

For example, you could configure sub-groups for the single agent in the SIT environment and then set up individual resources for each agent in the UAT environment.