Managing Environments

Environments represent logical deployment locations. Your deployment processes must run against at least one environment. Environments and their resources are used by applications and components at runtime.

An environment brings together components with the agent that deploys them. Deployment Automation maintains an inventory of every artifact deployed to each environment and tracks the differences between them.

Environments are created at the global level and used by multiple applications. This enables IT organizations to use either shared or application-specific environments. Environments are typically modeled on stages of the software project life cycle, such as development, QA, and 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 often required before processes can be run in an environment.

After you have created environments, you can create pipelines, which are sequences of environments where application process requests are propagated. 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. For details on environment configuration at the application level, see Application Environments.

The following topics describe how to manage environments.