Application onboarding

Applications that want to interact with the Nexeed Industrial Application System have to be registered in order to enable secure communication. In the hereafter described onboarding process, we need two actors:

This separation is needed to control and restrict the registration to only applications, that are meant to be in the system. The operator acts as gatekeeper in his task of maintaining the integrity of the whole NEXEED software system.

In the beginning of most software lifecycles, developers will have the need to quickly register and un-register their own application for testing and validation purposes. This is then of course leaning into the DevOps paradigm. In such cases, operator and developer duty must be performed by one person or group of people. Later, on production environments, we strongly advice to keep both duties strictly separated.

When operators face large systems (e.g. an installation of Nexeed Industrial Application System can come with 30+ modules), it is quite recommended to automate the steps needed for registering modules in the system. A possible way to do so is to use automation tooling like Ansible, puppet or similar. Then, the manual step of registering an application in Multitenant Access Control is only needed once up-front for this tool, and, given the right permissions are assigned, all other onboarding steps are done by it subsequently for each module. In certain circumstances, even the manual step can be automated, as this chapter explains.

To onboard your application into Nexeed Industrial Application System, the following steps are needed:

(assuming your application comes with a UI and/or provides common artifacts like a documentation of some sort)

Further topics

Besides Multitenant Access Control and Web Portal, other key modules of the Nexeed Industrial Application System also provide means to register your application for their purposes: