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.
Let's checkout an example of environments below. You may have completely different names and number of environments. You can configure permissions, approvals, schedule windows, pipeline configurations, and other settings on specific environments.
Each environment will have some technology components. As environments are used for different purposes, it is very likely that same applications 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 each individual technology across environments a Target Group. The wide rectangles that go through multiple environments below are Target Groups. Each Target Group is uniquely identified in FlexDeploy.
The intersection of an Environment and Target Group is known as a Target or Environment-Instance. A target is the installation of a technology in a specific environment. You will configure each Target with properties and endpoints, which allows FlexDeploy to communicate with that specific installation to perform necessary actions. Build and Deploy actions are invoked in the context of a specific Target. For example, you may be deploying an EAR to the DEV environment of the WLS1 Target Group.
FlexDeploy allows customers to describe their topology using Environments, Target Groups, and Endpoints. This topology definition provides the necessary mechanics for configuring Endpoints and properties to effectively manage your enterprise network of platforms, technologies, applications and servers. Builds, Deployments, Utility Executions, and Test Executions are run on Targets, the intersection of an environment and Target Group.