Modeling deployment topologies
With the deployment planning tools,
you can create topologies, a type of model that shows
the relationships between information technology resources. You can
also plan and validate deployment scenarios.
Planning for deployment and deploying applications can be complicated
and error-prone. The deployment planning tools in IBM® Rational® Software Architect Designer simplify
the deployment process in these ways:
- You can introduce deployment planning earlier in the application development cycle by capturing the structure and requirements of the application in a format that deployment architects can use to design appropriate infrastructure for the application.
- You can promote communication between the development and deployment teams by sharing and reusing designs and templates of deployment topologies.
- You can enforce architectural decisions on a deployment plan, such as the best practices or standard designs of your organization.
- You can validate deployment scenarios before trying them in the real world, identifying incompatibilities and necessary configuration tasks.
- After you have a valid deployment scenario, you can recapture and share that scenario in order to reproduce a successful deployment.
Deployment planning with the deployment planning tools often
follows these general steps:
- Create deployment patterns, which are either complete topologies that describe a goal for deployment or smaller templates that represent particular arrangements of IT resources that you plan to use in deployment.
- Create analysis topologies that illustrate the fundamental structure of the application at a high level of abstraction.
- Plan a specific deployment instance that describes how the completed application is deployed on specific, existing IT resources; using the topology editor, ensure that the deployment instance is valid by resolving any potential problems with the deployment instance and identifying any configuration tasks that must be performed on the resources before deployment.
- Deploy the application according to the deployment instance.
- Store the successful deployment instance so that you can reproduce or improve the instance for the next application.
Other resources for the tools are available in the help system:
- A comprehensive introduction to the topology editor is available in the tutorial Planning deployment with the topology editor.
- For example topologies, see Samples for the deployment planning tools.