Architecture and Environment Management
Domain 1 checks whether you can reason about OutSystems environment topology, LifeTime's role, and how applications move through delivery stages. Expect questions on environment purpose, deployment controllers, permissions, tags, and dependency-safe promotion.
Core rules
- A typical OutSystems landscape has Development, Quality, and Production environments; larger programs add pre-production or staging. Each environment runs Platform Server and its own database.
- LifeTime is the centralized console, installed with the Production environment, and manages all registered environments. Service Center is environment-specific and never orchestrates cross-environment deployments.
- Applications group modules; solutions group applications for release. Modules are the unit that compiles and deploys; dependencies must be included or already present in the target.
- A deployment controller handles the target-side work: validating, compiling, applying database changes, and publishing. The target must be reachable and on a compatible Platform Server version.
- Tags mark a deployed state in an environment. They are release markers, not source-control branches, and can be used to redeploy a known version.
Worked example
A team has Dev to QA to Prod. A developer fixes a bug in an order module that references a shared customer module. In Dev, both modules changed. They open LifeTime, create a deployment plan from Dev to QA, include the order module and the customer module, validate, and deploy. QA tests pass; they tag QA as 1.4.0-rc, then deploy the tag to Prod. Reasoning: the customer module must travel with the order module because the target may not have the new public element; tagging gives a repeatable release point. If they deployed only the order module, validation would likely fail or runtime would break.
Traps
- Treating Service Center as a cross-environment deployment tool.
- Forgetting dependent modules or assuming Prod already has them.
- Tagging after deployment instead of at the verified release point.
- Ignoring Platform Server version mismatch warnings in LifeTime.