What’s a Galaxy?

Within Application Server, a Galaxy represents your entire production environment, including all computers and components that run your application. A Galaxy is a collection of platforms, engines, templates, instances, and attributes you define as the parts of your specific application. Persistent information about this collection of objects is stored in a Galaxy database.

A Galaxy database resides on a single network computer. A Galaxy database can reside on any computer on your network with the SQL Server, Bootstrap, and Galaxy Repository software installed. But, you cannot store parts of a Galaxy database on several computers.

A Galaxy Repository (GR) is the name of the single computer where the Galaxy database is located.

You can deploy Galaxy components, such as platforms and engines, on multiple computers to share the work load while applications are running. For more information, see Deploy.

A Galaxy's namespace is the set of unique object and attribute identifiers. The namespace and the values of each of its identifiers define an Application Server application, and can be accessed by clients of the configuration system as well as the Application Server Message Exchange in a deployed system.

A key benefit of the Application Server namespace is that it allows Application Server objects and process data to be referenced by scripts and animation links from any computer in the Galaxy without the reference needing to specify the object's location.

Galaxies also include security, which is turned off by default. Using security allows you to limit what users can do. You can add more users, security roles, and security groups later if you want. For more information, see Configuring Security.