Configuring the tutorial system#

Configure the resources to define the blue and green systems.

Before you begin the tutorial, make sure that you complete the Prerequisites.

Like all HCL™ Launch tutorials, to work through this one you need an agent that is running on a target computer system or systems. The target can be a cloud resource, a virtual image, or a physical computer.

  1. The tutorial references the application created in the JPetStore tutorial.

    If you did not complete that tutorial, you can use any multi-component HCL Launch application that you have sufficient permissions to modify.

  2. While the examples in the tutorial show information for a Linux™ operating system, you can use any operating system.

  3. Ensure that you have an agent installed in your environment.

    The way these logical environments are implemented relies on the way that HCL Launch represents target environments as resources. In the tutorial, you create a single production environment consisting of several nodes, and then duplicate the resources to represent the second system. These resources behave like separate systems, even though the resources point to the same physical system. For simplicity, you can use a single agent for the logical environments that you create in the tutorial.

  4. Add component tags to the JPetStore components.

    You can tag components while you work on the Components tab, or you can tag components while you work in the Resources tab. Make sure that you use the Components tab because the tags that you associate with components in these two contexts behave differently.

    To add tags to components, complete the following steps:

    1. On the Components page, click the Add tag action for the JPet-Store-APP component, and then select the JPetStore tag.

      If you do not have the tag, in the Add Tag window, click Create Tag, and then define the new tag.

    2. Add the JPetStore tag to the JPet-Store-WEB, and JPet-Store-DB components.

      Later in the tutorial, you use the tag in an Install Multiple Components application process step. For the step to work, the tagged component processes must all have the same name.

      Note: If you are using another multi-node application instead of JPetStore, add the same tag to each component used by the application.

    By using component tags, your resources and application can access all the components in an application with a single tag reference.

Parent topic: Blue-green deployments

Creating the load balancer component#

Create a component to abstractly represent the load balancer.

Multinode installations routinely use load balancers to rout incoming traffic to the next eligible node. There are many load balancers and just as many ways to configure them. For the tutorial, the load balancer is represented as a component within the JPetStore application.

The tutorial load balancer component has an operational process called Change node port that abstractly changes the active port on a node. You pass the port name that should be active during processing. You use the environment property environment.LBPort to define the logical environment's port.

  1. Create a component and name it Load balancer or something similar.

  2. Create an Operational (No Version Needed) process for the Load balancer component and name it Change node port, or something similar.

    You do not need versioning for the simple process that you create for the component.

  3. Add the Load balancer component to the JPetSore application.

The