Galaxy overview

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. Within Application Server, both templates and instances are collectively referred to as objects. For more information about what templates and instances are, see Templates and instances. A Galaxy consists of various objects that represents your entire production environment, including all computers and components that run your application.

A Galaxy Repository (GR) is the name of the single computer where the Galaxy database is located. A Galaxy database resides on a single network computer (the Galaxy Repository) and contains configuration details, including security and licensing information, for all assets that will be deployed at run time. A Galaxy database can reside on any computer on your network with SQL Server, Bootstrap, and Galaxy Repository software installed. A single Galaxy database cannot be split up among multiple computers. However, you can create multiple GR nodes and allow Galaxies to communicate with each other. For more information, see The multi-galaxy environment .

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 Configure security.