Understand hybrid deployment and associating apps
1. What does this page cover?
Learn how you can build and develop your application on our low-code cloud platform and deploy the same in your on-premise Creator environment.
2. Availability
Applications for hybrid deployments:
- Can be created only in the paid plans of Creator. You need to contact onprem-sales@zohocreator.com to enable this feature for your On-premise account.
- Are available in all data centers.
- Only the super admin, admins, and developers can create and manage applications (on both cloud and on-premise setups), while other users can access, view, and edit them with relevant permissions.
3. Hybrid deployment in Creator
A hybrid setup refers to a computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure (including private clouds) with third-party public cloud service providers, thereby enabling data and applications to be shared between them. In this setup, you can build applications in your cloud platform and run them in your on-premise infrastucture. This orchestrated approach between these two platforms allows organizations to leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud resources, thus offering greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
In Zoho Creator, you can create a cloud-based application and deploy it in your on-premises infrastructure (hybrid deployment). This means that any application built on the Zoho Creator cloud platform can be deployed as a stand-alone app in your Creator on-premise setup and private cloud environments.
- In this method, the development and subsequent deployment of your application are fully separated.
- You need to have separate accounts for Creator (cloud) and Creator (On-Premise).
After developing the application in your Creator cloud account, you can download and upload the application (patch) as a .zip file in your Creator on-premise account and let users start utilizing it. This method allows your cloud applications to interact with your on-premise systems and thereby lets you accommodate the unique business needs of your organization.
3.1. Prerequisites
You must complete all the prerequisites outlined below before you use the Hosting section to create and configure your hybrid host (deployment).
- Ensure to have the required infrastructure to host the application in your on-premise setup or private cloud.
- Ensure that you've installed the latest available version of Creator On-premise.
- The super admin email of the cloud account should be the same as the super admin in the on-premise account.
- The application that you upload from the cloud to your on-premise account should not have any unsupported components (refer to the Limitations section below).
3.2 What is a host in a hybrid setup?
A host (deployment server) acts as the orchestrator that handles the association, distribution, and management of applications (including updates) across both cloud and on-premises environments, ensuring seamless integration and efficiency.
3.3 Why choose to build and associate apps in a hybrid deployment?
A hybrid deployment lets you:
- Experience remote deployment with limited cloud access
- Ensure complete data visibility and control
- A central Hosting module to manage all your deployments
- Host mission-critical apps in the cloud that can’t afford down time due to connectivity outages
3.4 Where can you associate apps to hybrid hosts in Creator?
To maximize the benefits of a hybrid-cloud architecture, you need to manage applications and resources across the multiple clouds centrally. The Hosting module in the Creator (cloud) lets you manage all the host resources in a single, common section. It lists all the hosts configured in your account and the multiple apps associated with each host.
By default, all the apps you've created in Creator (cloud) would be added to Zoho Public Cloud host. This is the default host in which apps in production stage will be associated to and cannot be edited. However when you create a new host, you can add the already associated apps in the default host to the newly-created host.
3.5 How does this work?
You must create a web application in Creator (cloud) first. Post creation, you need to publish your application and its changes to Environments. The Environments tab in your Creator account can be used to publish your app changes from the stage environment to the desired production environment.
The published app can then be associated with the required host in the Hosting section. Next, you need to download the version patches from the required application's version history and upload them to your Creator On-premise application. Now, your users can start adding data to your hybrid application.
Info: Your app's data (entered by users) will be stored in your On-premise account, whereas the structural meta data will be stored in your cloud account.
4. See how it works
5. Use cases
Case 1:
Let's assume you've created a Hospital Management application in Creator. You can use our cloud application for real-time monitoring of patient health data to enhance care delivery. Simultaneously, you can efficiently manage the sensitive patient data on-premises to comply with regulations like HIPAA.
Case 2:
Case 2:
Let's assume you've created a Project Management application in Creator. You can easily manage the non-sensitive processes, such as Task Assignment and Tracking, Scheduling and Calendar Management, Resource Allocation, Status Reporting, and so on, in your cloud application, and handle sensitive process like customer information, revenue, and payroll processes in your Creator on-premises setup.
6. Navigation guide for creation of hosts
After creating the app, navigate to the Hosting section under the Deploy module. Next, click + Create Host at the top-right corner in the Hosting page. The Create Host pane will slide in from the right. You can now create hosts and associate apps to each host. Learn how
7. Things to know
- An application can be associated to both single and multiple hosts.
- Publishing changes to an associated app can be done to either a single hosts or to multiple hosts in parallel.
- You need to manually download the updated version of your associated application from Creator (cloud) and import the same in your Creator On-Premise account in the correct order.
- You can download individual and multiple versions (including previous versions) of your Creator application.
- When you want to remove an application associated with a host from an environment, you need to disassociate it from its host first.
- When you delete an application in Creator cloud that is associated with a host, you can still access that application in your On-premise account until the most recent update (before deletion in your cloud account).
- Your application data will be stored in your Creator On-premise account, while the meta data will be stored in the cloud. This means that you can perform edit actions only in your Creator cloud application.
- You can refer to logs in your On-premise account to check your application's performance, keep track of actions executed in an application, or in the event of action failure.
- Whenever new features become available in the cloud version of your Creator application (such as a new theme), they will be available in the associated on-premise application only after the corresponding On-premise patch has been applied.
The On-premise patch will not be available immediately along with the cloud release and will be delayed.
8. Limitations
- Currently, we only support On-premise compatible components when you create applications in Creator (cloud) and use them inside Creator on-premise account.
- The components that are not supported in On-premise include
- AI fields
- AR fields
- Widgets
- Pivot charts and pivot tables
- Integration forms/fields/tasks (connections)
- AI tasks
- Push notifications
- Payment workflows
- If any unsupported component has been included, it needs to be manually removed from that downloaded version of your application before you can upload the same into your Creator on-premise account.
- If multiple versions of the downloaded application contain the same unsupported component, then it needs to be removed from each version manually.
- Currently, we don't support automatic data and user sync between your Creator cloud and On-prem applications. This means that you can have different sets of users (based on respective plans) in both accounts.
- You cannot reference data from other applications via lookup fields and Deluge functions.
- Maximum zip file size that can be uploaded in On-Premise is 10MB.
9. Related topics
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