The main architectural concepts you need to understand are as follows:
Control Panel
The Control Panel is the actual web application that you will use to develop, operate, and govern your Frends tenant. The Control Panel is sometimes referred to as the Frends UI. Additionally, the Control Panel is always delivered as a managed service by Frends, which means that the customer does not access or manage the underlying infrastructure.
Agents
Frends Agents are the actual integration runtimes that execute the integrations you build using Frends. Frends Agents can be deployed to run in almost any Environment such as:
PaaS model, where Frends hosts the Agents for the Customer as a service.
Ground deployment, where the Customer deploys the Agent to their own on-premise environment either on Windows or Linux servers, or as a container deployment.
Cloud deployment, where the Customer deploys the Agent to their own cloud infrastructure either on Windows or Linux virtual servers, or as a container deployment.
Agent Groups
Agent Groups are physical collections of Agents that always execute a shared set of integrations and their versions. You can think of Agent Groups as gathering multiple Agents to a single executable location that can be extended to run on multiple servers to achieve high-availability configurations.
Environments
Environments are logical collections of Agent Groups that typically separate development, test and production Environments from one another.
An example of a typical ground (on-premise) deployment of four Frends Agents:
One Agent in the Development Environment
One Agent in the Test Environment
Two Agents in an Agent Group in the Production Environment
The next article is Introduction to Frends UI Navigation