Can I control deployments of system-artifacts during provisioning?

Yes, now you can control the deployments of system-artifacts in a phased manner to run pre/post any action.

Prerequisites

System-Artifacts

System-Artifacts are the artifacts which have the dependency on the provisioning life-cycle and they need to be deployed during the provisioning of the environment.

Note:- System-artifact are completely different from the artifacts as they are dependent on the provisioning life-cycle. System artifacts are not controlled from Release Management unlike the usual artifacts and are defined from the Global Variable.

Example: MQ library is an example of the system-artifact as it needs to be deployed before the action configure-jca to make sure the configuration is appropriate and hence it needs to be deployed during the provisioning of the environment.

Problem

How to control the deployment phase of system-artifacts during the provisioning of an environment.

Phase deployment feature is introduced in the MyST 5.8.2 version and customers using the earlier versions can achieve provisioning-time deployments by defining a Global Variable property action.create-resource.pre=download-deploy-artifacts,deploy where create-resource is the name of the action.

Drawback with earlier approach

The user did not have the control over the deployments of system-artifacts as MyST deployed all the artifacts at a go which caused a few issues. Now, with the MyST versions 5.8.2, each system-artifact can be deployed at a desired level.

Example: A user can deploy shared library system-artifact as a pre create-resource action and also deploy a wsm policy as a post copy-domain action.

Solution

Deployments of system-artifacts can be achieved in two ways, either from the MyST Studio or from MyST CLI. The property core.deployment[ID].param[phase] is used to define the stage of deployment of the system-artifact where ID denotes the unique identifier for the artifact instance.

MyST Studio

• Login to MyST Studio, navigate to Platform Blueprint/Platform Model -> Edit Configuration -> Global Variable.
• Add the core.deployment properties of the system-artifact as shown in the below screenshot.

• The property highlighted above core.deployment[ID].param[phase] defines the phase where the system-artifact has to be deployed, you can either set it to pre/post to any action in the provisioning life-cycle.
• For instance if you want to schedule the deployment before the action create-resource then you can set it as shown in the above screenshot.
• Go to Platform Model -> Action -> Provision
• This will deploy the system-artifact during the provisioning of the environment.

MyST CLI

• Define the core.properties for the deployment under the mystWorkspace/conf/fc.properties as shown below.

    core.deployment[ID].artifact.repository.artifactId=wspolicy
    core.deployment[ID].artifact.repository.groupId=com.rubiconred
    core.deployment[ID].artifact.repository.type=jar
    core.deployment[ID].artifact.repository.version=1.0-3
    core.deployment[ID].param[extract-files]=policy
    core.deployment[ID].param[phase]=create-resource-post
    core.deployment[ID].type=wspolicy 
  

• The property highlighted above core.deployment[ID].param[phase] defines the phase where the system-artifact has to be deployed, you can either set it to pre/post to any action in the provisioning life-cycle.

• For instance if you want to schedule the deployment after the action create-resource then you can set the parameter as shown in the above properties.
• Run the provision action from the MyST CLI.
• This will deploy the system-artifact during the provisioning of the environment.