A runtime environment is the execution platform that runs a data integration or application integration task. You must have at least one runtime environment in each organization so that users in the organization can run tasks.
A runtime environment consists of one or more Secure Agents. A Secure Agent is a lightweight program that runs all tasks and enables secure communication across the firewall between your organization and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services.
You can set up runtime environments in the following ways:
License the Informatica Cloud Hosted Agent.
If you license the Hosted Agent, you run tasks within the Informatica Cloud hosting facility. Informatica maintains the Hosted Agent runtime environment and agents.
Create one or more Secure Agent groups.
You can download and install one or more Secure Agents to run within your network or in a cloud computing services environment such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. You can install one Secure Agent on each physical or virtual machine.
When you install a Secure Agent, it is added to its own group by default. If you have the Secure Agent Cluster license, you can add multiple agents to one Secure Agent group.
When you configure a connection or some types of tasks, you specify the runtime environment to use. The runtime environment determines which agent runs the tasks at run time. If the runtime environment is the Hosted Agent, the Hosted Agent runs the tasks. If the runtime environment is a Secure Agent group, any available agent in the group can run the tasks.
To use the runtime environment to run a mapping task that is based on an elastic mapping, the runtime environment must be associated with an elastic configuration. A Secure Agent uses the configuration to push data processing to an elastic cluster.