Groundplexes

Overview

A Groundplex is a self-managed Snaplex and is hosted by your organization, not by SnapLogic. This means that your organization defines the resources for the nodes in the Snaplex. A customizable Snaplex enables you to configure your Snaplex to specifications required by your IT infrastructure.

The term Groundplex refers specifically to your self-managed Snaplex. Despite what the name implies, you can manage a Groundplex through a cloud service. The assumption behind the use case of a Groundplex is that your organizations IT environments require customization beyond what a Snaplex managed by SnapLogic offers. Groundplexes allow access to endpoints that are not accessible from outside your organizations network. This setup provides the ability to manage the resources and comply with the security requirements in your computing environment.

Important: You must have Environment admin access to add or manage Groundplexes. Additionally, most administrative tasks generally require Environment admin access.

Audience

The audience for this series of Groundplex articles varies. At a large organization, the SnapLogic Environment admin who manages Groundplex resources might be or work with a DevOps engineer or network administrator.

However, the Groundplex can also serve a pipeline developer’s needs when managing node resources is a requirement for testing pipelines. In this case, the pipeline developer is the creator of the Snaplex and controls the underlying node resources.

In this article, the term Environment admin access does not distinguish between these roles and assumes that you have access to all the resources of your Groundplex nodes.

Features

Customization
You manage the resources for the Groundplex node. This enables you to customize both computing resources and network configurations to your specific requirements.
Security
You can install a Groundplex on an end user's local machine that provides access to data both on-premises, behind a firewall, and in the cloud.
Flexibility
You can install a Groundplex anywhere on the end user network that has access to the required data or on-premises applications.
Efficiency
The advantage of using a Groundplex instead of a cloud Snaplex is that data that resides in the end user data center can be accessed through SnapLogic pipelines. All pipelines and associated metadata are stored in the cloud by SnapLogic. When a pipeline needs to access data residing on-premise, the pipeline can be run with a Snaplex on-premise runtime path.

Workflow

  1. Plan your Groundplex deployment.
  2. Create a Snaplex in Admin Manager.
  3. Install the Snaplex in your environment.
  4. Test your Snaplex by running a pipeline.
  5. Check Status in Monitor on the Infrastructure page.
  6. Update Snaplex version as required.

Learn more about the Groundplex experience in this blog.

Remember: We do not recommend sharing a node between two Snaplogic Environments. Multiple installations of the SnapLogic Platform on a machine might compromise stability.

Prerequisites

  • You must be an Environment admin to set up a Groundplex.
  • You must have sufficient computing resources to create Groundplex nodes. These resources can be in the cloud or to an on-premises installation, or remote data center.
  • For a firewall, you need to have administrator access to your on-premises network.

Groundplex support

You can subscribe to Professional Services for assistance with installing and maintaining your Groundplex. To learn more, contact your SnapLogic CSM.