Introduction to Environment set-up

Environments are logical containers in Frends for isolating Agent Groups and Agents which are used in different roles during the Process lifecycle. The most used scenario is to have three Environments:

Each Environment has their own set of Agent Groups with Agents that are actually executing the Processes. Environments can have multiple Agent Groups for different use cases and with different configurations. When planning your Environment setup, you need to evaluate what you need to accomplish. For example, with this three Environment setup you have one Environment where you develop the Processes, one where you test them and one for the finished products. The best advice is to scale the Environments to your organization's needs. Every Environment will have their own Environment Variables. These variables are the only setting that are linked to the Environment level.

Environments can also be utilized for security and user management. This is possible by limiting user access to a certain Environment or allowing users to access a specific Environment. For example, in large organizations every sub-department might need their own Environment to test the Processes. This feature is not possible with Agent Groups.

From a business standpoint, an Environment can be used as a logical isolating tool to isolate an organization's departments under different Environments. Environments are also the only containers in Frends that can be used in user management when you require a container in which users can edit the Processes and view the Instances. For example, if you have a development team that is building Processes, it would be beneficial to have their access rights limited only to Development and Test Environments. The Production Environment might only be needed for the Operations team who are responsible for the production side of things.

The next article is Introduction to Agent Group set-up

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