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I'm trying to understand the new TopologyManager in Web8 and want to validate the relationships between the new entity types. I will first describe what I understand and then follow with some questions about certain relationships.

In the CMS we have a Business Process that has a 1:1 relationship with a TopologyType.

The TopologyType has a 1 to many relationship with Topologies. (The TopologyType has one of more Purpose "attributes".)

The Topology has a 1 to many relationship with the Content Delivery Environments (CDE)?

Each CDE has a 1:1 relationship with a website?

The website has a 1:1 relationship with the webapp.

Can you please answer with a 'normal' scenario of having 1 Publication publishing to 1 Website with both a Staging and Live environment? From there, we could make it more complicated with mini-sites, etc. But, to start with, it would be nice to keep it as simple as possible.

Questions:

  • How many CDE environments can a Topology connect with? What is the normal scenario and what is the scale out scenario?
  • How many websites can a Content Delivery Environment connect with? What is the normal scenario and what is the scale out scenario?
  • What is the relationship with the purposes defined in the TopologyType to other items in the Topology?
    • The purpose in the TopologyType is the 'TargetType' in the CMS and what the users see when publishing? This is also where we set the security for who can publish to it?
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3 Answers 3

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We have been working on the following simple diagram of the Topology Manager structure, to clarify a couple a things.

Topology Management Simple structure

  • It is not shown, but you can have multiple CD environments per Topology (for example, you see "Staging", but you probably also have "Live").
  • A TopologyType can have multiple Topologies. Multiple topologies may use the same TopologyType.
  • Each CD Environment can have multiple Web sites.
  • A Web site (or Base URL) can have multiple WebApps, each with its own context path, but by default you have "/".
  • Each of the Purposes has to be connected to a CD Environment, based on the purposes in the TopologyType.
  • What people see when publishing is still the Target Type, just like before.
  • The security you can set in the Business Process Type, when selecting a Target Type. See screenshot below.

enter image description here

If you are looking for details, I think Rick or Likhan can give you a deeper insight.

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  • QQ - is it possible to add an additional Purpose(s) to an existing TopologyType?
    – Andy Ross
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 18:47
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Nikki's answer is way more detailed than mine will be, but wanted to make sure we covered all your questions:

  • How many CDE environments can a Topology connect with?

There are no known limitations on this, a Topology can have as many CD environments as you need.

  • What is the normal scenario and what is the scale out scenario?

There is no "normal" scenario, that's the same as asking how many Publication Targets a pre-Web8 environment would need. I would say that I expect that in most cases you'll have 2 environments (Staging + Live). You could have many more, depending on what your dev flows are.

  • How many websites can a Content Delivery Environment connect with?

There are no known limitations.

  • What is the normal scenario and what is the scale out scenario?

Again, impossible to answer, it depends on your requirements. You know as well as me that one of our deployments could support anything from 1 to many thousands of websites.

  • What is the relationship with the purposes defined in the TopologyType to other items in the Topology?

Purposes are supposed to represent the objective of our environment. This allows you to "publish by purpose", where for instance, in an workflow activity, you can ask Tridion CM to "publish to staging" instead of "publish to tcm:0-3-65537", which - I'm sure you'll agree - could be a great benefit in the long run.

  • The purpose in the TopologyType is the 'TargetType' in the CMS and what the users see when publishing? This is also where we set the security for who can publish to it?

That's the easiest way to transition to new-style publishing, yes. But purposes are bigger than Target Types, as I hope my previous bullet started to show. There's a lot more to come on purposes.

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To further elaborate on the "normal scenario versus scale out scenario" questions: the idea is that the entities in Topology Manager (Topology, CmEnvironment, CdEnvironment, Website, WebApp) represent logical environments rather than physical environments.

Scaling out is about running a logical environment on multiple physical ones. So, I don't expect any differences in Topology Manager if you scale out some subsystems.

The number of CD Environments you have in a Topology is purely determined by the number of (logical) environment purpose you have defined in your Topology Type.

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