Key Concepts, Components, and Terms

Before you use VB Studio, it helps to become familiar with these key concepts, components, and terms. (If you have general questions about Oracle Cloud features and services, see Oracle Cloud Terminology in Getting Started with Oracle Cloud.)

Term	Description
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)	Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a set of cloud services that enable you to build and run a wide range of applications and services in a highly available hosted environment. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers high-performance compute capabilities (as physical hardware instances) and storage capacity in a flexible overlay virtual network that is securely accessible from your on-premise network.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute (OCI Compute)	Service that hosts virtual machines (VMs) on Oracle Cloud with all the necessary storage and networking resources. VB Studio uses the VMs to run project builds.
OCI Compute VM instance	A virtual machine that runs on top of physical bare metal hardware. To learn more about a Compute instance, see Overview of the Compute Service.
OCI Compute VM shape	A shape is a template that determines the number of CPUs, amount of memory, and other resources allocated to a newly created VM Compute instance. To find more about shapes, see VM Shapes.
OCI region	OCI is hosted in regions and availability domains. A region is a localized geographic area, and an availability domain is one or more data centers located within a region. To learn more about regions and availability domains, see Regions and Availability Domains.
OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) and subnets	A VCN is a software-defined network that you set up in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centers in a particular region. To find out more about VCNs and subnets, see VCNs and Subnets and Overview of Networking.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage (OCI Object Storage)	Oracle Cloud service that hosts containers on Oracle Cloud to store project data. VB Studio uses the buckets to archive build artifacts and Maven artifacts, and export project data.
Oracle Cloud Applications	Oracle Cloud Applications are a set of modular Cloud-ready enterprise applications. To learn more, see https://www.oracle.com/applications/.
Application extension (App UI)	An App UI is an application that includes a user interface component in the form of Visual Builder pages and flows. Some App UIs are created by Oracle—like some Oracle Cloud Applications—but you can build your own App UIs and deploy them as peers alongside Oracle’s App UIs in your Oracle Cloud Applications ecosystem.
Visual Builder	A Visual Builder instance that provides the server for delivering pages in web applications, and services your apps might use to access data, including the database used to store data and the proxy server for managing connections to REST services.
Visual application	A responsive application developed using VB Studio's browser-based development environment. You deploy a visual application to a Visual Builder instance.
Project	A project is a collection of VB Studio features. You can use a project to host source code files, track issues, collaborate on code, build, and deploy your applications. A project can host multiple Git repositories. Each Git repository can have multiple branches and hundreds of code files. You can create a merge request for each branch of the Git repository and ask reviewers to review the code. You can create and configure multiple build jobs to generate different project artifacts that you can deploy to Oracle Cloud or your on-premise web server.
Organization	The top-most entity in the project structure of VB Studio. Think of an organization as the umbrella for all the projects in a given identity domain.
VB Studio Designer	VB Studio's browser-based development environment.
Git repository	A Source Code Management (SCM) and distributed version control tool to host source code files.
Maven repository	A hosted binary repository to store build artifacts, library files, and dependencies for Maven applications.
Issue tracker	A built-in issue management system to create and track tasks, defects, and features.
Environment	Defines the target Oracle Cloud Applications, Visual Builder, Oracle Cloud SaaS, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service instance as a single entity. You'll define an environment to deploy an application to a service instance or to get information from a service instance.
Merge request and code review	A method to merge a Git repository branch with another branch. Before merging the branches, team members can review differences between files of both branches and provide their feedback.
Wiki	Built-in wiki system to help your team author and manage wiki pages.
Build system	A built-in system to define and automate builds of your applications.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)	Continuous integration is a set of practices that allow development teams to implement small code changes and push the code to version control repositories, such as Git, frequently. Continuous delivery is a practice that enable developers to produce software in short cycles.
VM build executor	An OCI Compute VM instance dedicated to run VB Studio builds. Only one build can run on a VM build executor at a time. To learn more, see VM Build Executors.
Build executor template	A template that defines the operating system and the software installed on a VM build executor. To learn more, see Build Executor Templates.
Docker image	Defines the operating system and software packages your organization needs to run builds on a Docker executor. A Docker image can be either imported from an external Docker registry or created from a build executor template.
Docker deployment VM	An OCI VM Compute instance dedicated to run builds of jobs defined in VB Studio projects using Docker executors.
Docker executor	When a job is created, a Docker image is associated as a build template with the job. Then, when the job's build is triggered, a Docker executor is created using the Docker image and deployed on any Deployment VM to run the build. Unlike a VM executor, a Docker executor is not directly associated with a specific VM.
Job (or build job)	A configuration that defines your application's builds. You can create a job to perform various actions, such as package artifacts, run shell commands, run unit test scripts, and deploy application artifacts.
Build	The result from a job’s run.
Pipeline	A path or a chain of builds. A pipeline helps you run continuous integration jobs and reduce network traffic.
Oracle Java Cloud Service	Oracle Cloud service to deploy web applications to a public Oracle WebLogic Server domain on Oracle Cloud.