Overview of Managing Applications Environments

Here are some terms you may encounter when creating or managing an applications environment. Because the environments are running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it is helpful to understand some basics about the features of OCI.

ENVIRONMENT TYPE or INSTANCE TYPE

The environment or instance type options will vary depending on the application.

Oracle Maymiser, offers INSTANCE TYPES and provides the instance type options of Maxymiser and Recommendations.

Some applications provide PRODUCTION and NON-PRODUCTION environment or instance types.

The PRODUCTION environment supports your day-to-day real-time business operations by authorized users.

Test and development environments are both NON-PRODUCTION environments. The test environment is typically used for staging before application deployment to production and for validation of maintenance updates before the same maintenance is applied to the production environment. Development environments (also referred to as Additional Test Environments or ATEs) are typically used as individual or collaborative development sandboxes for developing extensions (such as reporting, pages, and interfaces) or integrations with other applications. The number and types of environments allotted to your tenancy depend on your order.

REGION

A region is where your environments are physically hosted. This region is not the same as the geographical region that you selected on your subscription order.

COMPARTMENT

Compartments are a fundamental component of OCI for organizing and isolating your cloud resources. You can use them to logically separate resources for the purposes of measuring usage and billing, access (through the use of policies), and isolation (separating the resources for one project or business unit from another). For example, if you need to grant access to one group of users to your test environment and another group of users to your production environment, you can assign your test and production environments to different compartments. For more information, see Understanding Compartments.

IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT (IAM)

IAM is the service that provides authentication and authorization for OCI resources. You interact with the IAM service when you create users, groups, and policies to manage your applications environments.

POLICY

OCI IAM uses policies to specify who can access which resources. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy itself. If you give a group access to the tenancy, the group automatically gets the same type of access to all the compartments inside the tenancy. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies.

RESOURCE IDENTIFIERS or OCIDs

Applications environment management supports environments as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Most types of resources have a unique, Oracle-assigned identifier called an Oracle Cloud ID (OCID). For information about the OCID format and other ways to identify your resources, see Resource Identifiers.