Creating and managing routes

A route is an ordered set of environments representing deployment stages of an application. Route types enable you to implement business policies for different types of application deployments.

Management of a route includes adding and removing environments, changing environment order, and, for mixed-mode routes, grouping and ungrouping environments. You initiate these actions from the routes management pane, accessed by clicking the Topology tab, followed by the Routes menu option on the left.

Types of routes

The following table describes the types of deployment routes:

Route type	Description	Appropriate use
Strict route	Lists environments to which deployments must occur in the specified order For example, if the route contains the QA, Staging, and Production environments in that order, applications must first be successfully deployed to QA before they can deploy to Staging, and Production deployments can happen only after the first two successful deployments.	For strict control of the order of the environments where applications are deployed, and applications must be deployed to every environment
Open route	Lists environments to which deployments can occur in any order at any time For example, if development divisions were granted their own deployment environments, you could create an open route for each of their environments, which they could upgrade to later integration builds when their division was ready.	For application builds intended for a broad audience in which the order of deployment is not important
Mixed-mode route	Lists grouped environments to which deployments must occur in the order listed. Deployments may not be made to the next group until a successful deployment has been made to the previous group. Deployments may be made to any member of any allowed group. For example, if different testing groups used different sets of servers and worked on their own schedules, a mixed-mode route could include a group of environments for QA, such as a functional test environment and a system test environment.	For different groups to deploy an application to their environments in an unspecified order but deployments to certain environments must still occur before deployments to other environments

Before you begin

You must create the environments to add to a route, using the Topology tab (see Creating-and-managing-the-deployment-topology).

To create a route

Click the Topology tab.
From the left menu, select Routes.
Click New Route on the right.
Enter a descriptive label for the route.
From the menu, select a type for the route.
Click Create.
Add environments by dragging and dropping from Available Environments into the Environments tab.

To add an environment to an existing route

Click the Topology tab.
From the left menu, select Routes.
Click the name of the route to which you want to add an environment.
Add environments by dragging and dropping from Available Environments into the Environments tab.

To remove an environment from a route

Click the Topology tab.
From the left menu, select Routes.
Click the name of the route that you want to change.
Click Remove associated with the environment to be removed.

To change the order of an environment or environment group inside a route

Click the Topology tab.
Click the name of the route that you want to change.
Click and drag the "grab" icon to the left of the environment or environment group and move it to the order that you want.
Note
Only ungrouped environments can be grouped with other environments (grouped or ungrouped).

To group environments in a mixed-mode route

Click the Topology tab.
Click the name of the route that you want to change.
Identify the environment to group and relocate it before or after the environment or environment group that will include the new environment.
Click the appropriate group icon to "group with above" or "group with below" for the groupings that you want.

To ungroup an environment from an environment group

Click the Topology tab.
Click the name of the route that you want to change.
Identify the environment to ungroup.
Click its ungroup icon.
The environment is removed from the group and appears below the group.

To modify a route

Editing a route includes changing its label and type.

Note

If you change a route from mixed mode, all its environment set associations are lost and require reconstituting if the route is reassigned as a mixed-mode type.

To change the label or type for a route

Click the Topology tab.
Click the name of the route that you want to change.
Change the route name and route type as appropriate.
Click the Submit checkmark icons to save the changes.