General Concept
Descriptions
The Agent is a core component of the platform and enables cross-network communication between Source Systems and the platform. There are two other terms which help to organize the agents: Locations and Agent Groups.
Location
A Location is no technical object in the backend but only used to organize and structure Agent Groups and Agents. It describes an area based on geographical and/or IT network related characteristics and can group several Agent Groups.
Agent Group
Similar to the Location, the Agent Group is used to organize and structure Agents. It can group several single Agents. Several single Agents can be used for horizontal scaling.
Agent
The core component is the Agent. It is based on .NET Core. Since it comprises the overall .NET framework it is quite large. The functionality required for Virtual Data Platform is less than 5 MB. There are versions for Windows and Linux.
It includes all logic which is required to handle platform requests. For example it includes all Query Handlers of for all Source Systems in its memory. This allows to automatically update the Query Handlers in case of bug fixes or new functionalities.
The authentication and data encryption for the communicating with VDP is based on a certificate.
Install, Run and Update an Agent
Since the Agent has to run in the network of the Source Systems which often is on servers, these steps might require skills and access rights from system administrators on customer site.
The Agent originally has beed designed without any automized updating posibility. Which means, an already installed Agent could not be updated automatically but always requires a download of the new version via the Portal. In order to keep things simple and reduce the effort on customer site, newer versions of the Agent include some automatized updating procedure. However, as usual in software development, there are changes which are breaking. For these the Agent has to be re-installed from scratch.
A quick guide about how to install an Agent on your local Windows machine is described in the getting started section (gettingStartedInstallRunAgent). For more details about how to install, run and update Agents please refer to the description within the Locations and Agents (PortalLocationsAgents) section in the Portal.