Creating Applications on Custom Infrastructure

This topic describes how to design and create a new application on custom infrastructure. Custom infrastructure refers to custom appliances created from scratch or created starting from one of the generic catalog appliances.

CONTENTS

Creating an empty application

The first step is to create a new application. From the applications tab click the New button to create a new application. You will be prompted for a unique name for the application. Once the application is created, click on its name in the list to open it for editing.

Determine application boundary

The boundary of the application refers to what network services the application will provide and what network services the application will need. Network services provided by the application are its inputs and network services needed by the application are its outputs.

For each input, drag and drop an input gateway (IN) appliance from the system catalog onto the canvas.

For each output, drag and drop an output gateway (OUT or NET) appliance from the system catalog onto the canvas.

Configure each of the input and output gateway appliances by double-click on an appliance shape on the canvas or right-click on the appliance shape and choose Attributes, Resources, User Volumes or PropertyValues from the menu - See Instance Settings for details.

Create application volumes

The next step is to create the application volumes, on which you can place the code, scripts, content and databases that are specific for your application. Note, that you can use an application volume with more than one appliance.

To create an application volume, right-click on the application canvas and select Manage Volumes from the list. Next, click on the Add button, enter the name of the volume, its size, and filesystem and click 'Ok'. Repeat this process for each volume that you will need.

Assemble application infrastructure

The next step is to assemble the infrastructure you need between the inputs and the outputs of the application using appliances and servers from the catalogs and one or more custom appliances. See Catalog Reference for list of available ready-made appliances. See Appliance Creation Guide for information about creating a custom appliance.

Redirect Properties to application boundary

It is sometimes useful to redirect configurable properties, volumes, and attributes of an appliance to the application as a whole so that those settings may be configured from a single place. This is especially useful when an application has multiple instances of a particular appliance.

To define properties and volumes that are configurable on the application, right-click on the canvas for the MAIN assembly and select 'Edit Class' - See Assembly Class Editor for details.

After defining the properties and volumes on the assembly, you then need to go and configure each of the instances to redirect its properties to the assembly - see Instance Settings for details.

-- BeckyH - 10 Nov 2006