Db2 DevOps Experience terms and concepts

Before you start using Db2® DevOps Experience, familiarize yourself with the key terms and concepts used with Db2 DevOps Experience.

applications

An application is a logical collection of, or a set of references to, the objects that you create and manage together for the use of an application program or a set of application programs. Those objects can include databases, table spaces, tables, and indices in Db2.

Note: In the current releases of Db2 DevOps Experience, an application is associated with a specific subsystem.

application instances

A set of application objects that has been provisioned into the associated environment's subsystem.

When an instance has pending upstream changes to be pulled into an instance from an application, then that instance is not at the latest level with respect to the application. This is also called back leveled instance.

deprovision

To delete a provisioned application instance from the target system. The user who provisioned the application can deprovision it. In addition, team administrators can deprovision instances of applications owned by the team, regardless of who provisioned them.

environments

An environment is a collection of subsystems that are used by teams. The super administrator creates environments after subsystems are registered. After teams have been defined, each environment can be assigned to one or more teams.

provision

To copy resources, or objects, of an application that is defined in the original environment to a subsystem in the environment assigned to your team so that you can use those resources for development and testing without affecting the originating application.

With Db2 DevOps Experience, a team administrator or a team member can provision instances of applications onto environments that are assigned to the team to build their own environments for developing and testing application programs for which they are responsible. When they provision an instance of an application, the referenced objects are copied to the environment's subsystems.

Team members can change definitions of the provisioned objects if the originating application is owned by the team. The changes made on the instance can be reviewed by the team's team administrators and optional reviewers in the team through a pull request process. The changes can be merged into the original objects defined in the instance's originating application only after a team administrator has approved the pull request.

provisioning rules

A set of rules that define how application objects are to be named when the user provisions an application instance. You can define one set of provisioning rules for each subsystem type in an environment. If you do not define any provisioning rules for an environment, Db2 DevOps Experience automatically determines, during provisioning, the names of application objects based on the default provisioning rule for each object type to avoid naming conflicts.

pull requests

To request a review of the changes made to a provisioned application instance so that interested parties can review those changes and discuss potential impacts before merging the changes to the originating application. For any changes that have been made to an application instance, at least one team administrator of the team that owns the originating application must approve of those changes before they get merged into the originating application.

site rules

Rules that constrain how developers can change object definitions in provisioned application instances. Super administrators can create as many site rules as they want. Site rules can be associated with applications and environments.

teams

A team is a group of Unified Management Server users who work together toward a goal such as application development or test environment creation. Each team can be associated with the environments that it can use. Super administrators can create teams and assign environments. If SAF-based security is used, the super administrator should assign permissions to the security administrator to perform team management.

For details, refer to Setting up users and teams.

The following figure illustrates a high-level architecture of how Db2 DevOps Experience, together with Unified Management Server, manages and maintains various information.

In this figure, application metadata is a list of objects that make an application, along with their properties and relationships. Although application metadata cannot be viewed from IBM® Unified Experience for z/OS® web interface, it can be viewed from REST APIs.

Application object DDL statements define and manage application objects.