Overview of Distributed System Designers in Team Environments
Teams that design and develop distributed systems typically include one or more application architects, developers, and infrastructure architects. In Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition, members of these teams can visualize, document, and implement distributed systems by designing, configuring, and evaluating application systems for deployment. An application system is comprised of smaller systems that, at the most discrete level, are comprised of applications.
Different team members can use Distributed System Designers to design, evaluate, and implement application systems. All the models used to perform these high-level tasks are stored in files that are cross-referenced with each other, that support team design and development scenarios, and that enable the use of typical source code control techniques.
Team Interaction with Distributed System Designers
Using Distributed System Designers, architects and developers can perform the following high-level tasks:
Design, review, configure, and connect applications and application systems. (Application architects)
Create logical representations of target datacenters in which application systems will deploy. (Infrastructure architects)
Evaluate deployment for application systems in a target datacenter. (Application architects)
Implement the underlying application definitions in application systems. (Developers)
Application architects use Application Designer to define, review, configure, and connect applications that provide and use services and also to document application requirements. They can then use System Designer to design application systems composed from uses of the application definitions that they created. In turn, they can design systems that are composed from other systems, and ultimately, design large and complex systems.
Infrastructure architects can use Logical Datacenter Designer to create logical representations of these datacenters and document datacenter requirements by defining, configuring, and connecting logical servers and zones. At any point in designing a system, application architects can use Deployment Designer along with a logical representation of a target datacenter to evaluate deployment for any particular system.
In Architecture Edition, systems are described within the scope and context of a Visual Studio solution. For the applications in those systems that can be implemented within a solution, developers can continue defining them in code after the corresponding Visual Studio projects are generated. For more information, see Relationships Between System Definition Model (SDM) Documents.
See Also
Concepts
System Definition Model (SDM) Documents Under Source Control
Partitioning of Distributed System Solutions for Implementation