Working with deployments

Learn about deployments and how they work.

Projects published to your environment are called deployments. Deployments help ensure that the integration project is available in the specified environment and ready for use.

The deployment process includes the following steps.

  • Publish - Take the current state of the project, which includes all assets and configurations from one environment.
  • Deploy - Move the published project assets and configurations into another environment.
  • Activate - Ensure that all the necessary services, APIs, and workflows are active and operational in the new environment. Update configurations that might differ between environments, for example, database connections, API keys, or endpoint URLs.

Key considerations after deployments.

  • Environment-specific configurations - Adjusting configurations that might differ between environments, for example, database connections, API keys, or endpoint URLs.
  • Testing and Validation - Retesting the project in the new environment to help ensure that it works as expected. The deployment process relies on the state of the existing integration. If assets referenced in the integration are not yet available or configured in the target environment, deployment happens successfully. However, executions might fail due to missing configurations. Hence, after importing a project, review and configure the integration to ensure all referenced assets exist in the target environment. Deploy and configure any new services or components before initiating another deployment.
  • Monitoring and logging - Setting up monitoring to track the performance and operation of the deployed project.
Note:
  • Deploying a SOAP connector with around 100 operations takes about 3 minutes. If there are many operations or the SOAP configurations are complex, it is recommended to plan the deployment in multiple phases, to ensure a smooth process.
  • For projects involving custom connectors, the connector must be deployed using CLI (command line interface) to the target environment before deploying the integration.
  • All applications that are used in an integration must be configured in the target environment and then the assets must be deployed from the existing environment to the target environment.
  • Assets like reference data, project variables, vault variables, and certificates are not automatically deployed with the associated deployment. Manually add these assets to the target environment.
  • On-premises connectors must be deployed from the on-premises server and configured with the account name and other details in the target environment as in the source environment.
  • Workflows that use flow services cannot be deployed directly. The flow service references must be removed from the workflow and the assets must be deployed. After deployment, references must be added to connect the flow service to the workflow.
  • Production systems can have more than one instance serving requests for high availability. Any deployment or editing in the production system can impact running workflows, flow services, APIs, and so on. Run failures may occur when instances are updated with these latest changes. The system tries to detect and minimize these failures as much as possible; however, failures can still occur, especially with long-running executions under certain circumstances.

    Perform any publish-deploy and design-time activities in the production tenant during low-traffic time intervals and in a planned way to avoid any disruptions. Also, conduct original development, which requires frequent changes in the flow, in lower tenants (development tenant), and then promote them to the production tenant after thorough testing. This approach lets you minimize editing of assets on production, preventing the system from entering the scenario described above.

How to access deployments?

When any project is published to your tenant for the first time, you can see a project card that is associated with the deployment.

Open the project that must be deployed and the Deployments page appears, which lets you complete the deployment process.

The Deployments page consists of the following main sections.

  • Deployment versions - Lists all deployments that were published to this environment from other environments in a tabular format. The Deploy option appears in Actions if that specific deployment is not yet deployed. Click Deploy to open the Deployment wizard, which guides you through the process of deploying the project.
  • Publish history: Lists all deployments that are created under this environment and published to other environments.
    Note: Only the most recent 50 publish history records are listed.

Click View assets under Actions to view the list of assets, asset type, and their dependencies for each version.

Click Publish project to start the Publish project wizard, which guides you through the process of publishing the project.