An environment is a grouping of infrastructure and middleware items such as hosts, servers, clusters, and so on. An environment is used as the target of a deployment, allowing you to map deployables to members of the environment.
Deploy is an application release automation (ARA) tool that deploys applications to environments (for example, development, test, QA, and production) while managing configuration values that are specific to each environment. Deploy is designed to make the process of deploying applications faster, easier, and more reliable. You provide the components that make up your application, and Deploy does the rest.
The Deploy database is called the repository. It stores all configuration items (CIs), binary files - such as deployment packages, and Deploy security configuration - such as user accounts and rights. By default, Deploy uses an internal database that stores data on the file system. This configuration is intended for temporary use and is not recommended for production use. In production environments, the repository is stored in a relational database on a external database server. For more information, see using a database.
A deployment consists of all actions needed to install, configure, and start an application on a target environment.
You can use Deploy's provisioning feature to create cloud-based environments in a single action. The process of provisioning an environment using Deploy is very similar to the process of deploying an application.
When you update a deployed application, Deploy resolves the properties for the deployeds in the application in the same way that it does for the initial deployment of the application. This means:
Deploy contains information about your applications, environments, infrastructure, and deployments. Using the reporting functionality, you can gain insight into the state of your environments and applications.
Placeholders are configurable entries in your application that will be set to an actual value at deployment time. This allows the deployment package to be environment-independent and reusable. At deployment time, you can provide values for placeholders manually or they can be resolved from dictionaries that are assigned to the target environment.
You can view the history of successful deployments of application versions to an environment. This is useful when you want to determine placeholder value changes between versions for an environment, determine who made a specific change, and to support deployment rollbacks.