Application design and Environment management touch each other when the components designed and developed are deployed on servers. A seemingly simple task gets complicated when tens of interconnected applications are deployed in multiple environments made of hundreds of servers. This article is about how to systematically approach a large deployment. Some ideas are:
- develop a conceptual model for the application deployment based on UML,
- identify application design deliverables and environment management tasks involved in the deployment
- use tools to manage the inventory of the applications, servers and their association.
UML has the Deployment View to describe the link between the logical components 
and the run-time resources that will execute the code. The basic concepts are Node – the run-time computational resource, and Artifact – a physical entity such as a file. The Artifact is a “manifestation” of a component. In the real world, these concepts are not used by the implementation team, instead they operate with “servers”, “databases”, “Weblogic Servers.” UML2 provides ways to accommodate these, higher-level, entities. One way is to use the concept of “execution environment.” Databases and J2EE application container are execution environments and can be represented as Nodes in the deployment diagrams. To show that a database runs on a server I am using associations between nodes qualified with the stereotype <<hostedOn>>. The picture on the right shows how to represent the Weblogic, Database and the Unix Servers in UML.