Deploying and installing workflow automations

You can run a workflow automation directly or call it from other business automations and external clients. You can also publish a workflow as an automation service that you can call and reuse in a consistent way, for example from a user interface. The workflow automations run on workflow servers.
In Business Automation Studio, you can manage workflow servers in either offline mode or online mode:
  • In offline mode, you create a representation of a server and a version of a business automation (automation), as a deployment package, installed on it. In offline mode, you can plan your deployments to the actual server, creating the deployment packages and associated migration instructions. The deployment packages can be extracted at any time and deployed to the actual server.
  • In online mode, you get a view of the actual workflow server because the workflow server administrator configured it to be automatically connected to Business Automation Studio. In online mode, you can directly deploy a version of an automation that immediately appears on the workflow server. If the connected server is so configured, you can also remotely debug workflow automations using the designer. For information about configuring an online server to communicate with Business Automation Studio, see Managing online and offline workflow servers External link opens a new window or tab.

You can create any of the following offline server types by selecting Business automations > Workflow > Servers and clicking Create server:

Development
Use Development if the server you are configuring is to be used as a dedicated development runtime environment beyond the development environment for authoring where Business Automation Studio is running.
Test
Use Test if the server is to be used as a runtime environment for testing.
Staging
Use Staging if the server is to serve as a staging platform to be used as a preproduction runtime environment.
Production
Use Production if the runtime environment is to serve in a production capacity.

When you install your version, you can choose the server you want to use.