All companies, large and small, manage multiple environments for the purpose of development, testing, or hosting production solutions. Each of these environments comprise a number of platforms, technologies, and packaged applications across a varying number of servers (whether physical, virtual, or in the cloud). The centralized FlexDeploy server requires configuration information to be able to communicate across this broad topology.

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Now each environment will generally have some technology components. As environments are used for different purposes, it is very likely that same application installed in various environments may be configured differently even in terms of capacity. Our goal is to promote code and configurations through environments for various applications, middleware, databases. FlexDeploy calls such individual track of technology across environments as Instance"Target Groups". See example below for horizontal cross sections through environments. Each instance Target Group is uniquely identified in FlexDeploy.

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Now that we have Environments and InstanceTarget Groups, it is easy to realize that there is intersection for both logical constructs. This intersection is known as an Environment-Instance or Environment-Target Group. Each Environment Instance represents physical installation of some technology. You will configure each Environment Instance for various configuration properties and endpoints, which will allow FlexDeploy to communicate with that specific installation to perform necessary actions. Note that Build and Deploy actions are also invoked in context of a specific Environment Instance, i.e. you may be deploying an EAR application to the DEV environment for of the WLS1 instanceTarget Group.

So, FlexDeploy allows customers to describe their topology using Environments, Instances Target Groups, andEndpoints. This topology definition provides the necessary mechanics for configuring Endpoints and properties to effectively manage your enterprise network of platforms, technologies, applications and servers.

Screens used to configure and maintain Topology Settings

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