Managing Environments

An environment is a user-defined collection of resources that host applications. An environment is the application's mechanism for bringing together components with the agent that actually deploys them. Environments are typically modeled on some stage of the software project life cycle, such as development, QA, or production.

Environments can have different topologies. For example, an environment can consist of a single machine, be spread over several machines, or be spread over clusters of machines. Approvals are generally scoped to environments.

Deployment Automation maintains an inventory of every artifact deployed to each environment and tracks the differences between them.

Once created, environments are available to be added to pipelines and to applications. You can associate a pre-configured pipeline of environments and individual environments to an application.

Before you can run a deployment, you must create at least one environment and associate the environment with an application. In the application, you configure the environment specifically for that application and its component versions. The application environment configuration associates components with an agent on the target host.

The following topics describe how to manage environments.