A runtime environment is the execution platform that runs Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services assets such as tasks and taskflows. 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:
Use the Informatica Cloud Hosted Agent.
When you use the Hosted Agent, you run tasks within the Informatica Cloud hosting facility. Informatica maintains the Hosted Agent runtime environment and agents. For more information about the Informatica Cloud Hosted Agent, see Hosted Agent.
Create one or more Secure Agent groups.
You can install one or more Secure Agents to run within your network or in a cloud computing services environment such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 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. You can add multiple agents to one Secure Agent group. For more information about Secure Agent groups, see Secure Agent groups.
Configure a serverless runtime environment.
If your cloud environment is AWS, you can configure a serverless runtime environment. This environment is hosted by Informatica, so you don't need to configure a Secure Agent or Secure Agent group. For more information about serverless runtime environments, see Serverless runtime environments.
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 run a mapping in advanced mode, the agent can create a default local cluster on the agent machine so that you can begin developing and running advanced functionality on small data sets to test mapping logic. For more information, see Advanced Clusters.
Before you run mappings in advanced mode on a local cluster, make sure that the Secure Agent has enough resources so that it can create a cluster and run jobs successfully, especially if the Secure Agent is already running other jobs. If the Secure Agent doesn’t have enough resources, the jobs that are already running on the Secure Agent and the mappings in advanced mode will fail. It’s recommended to have at least 8 cores and 32 GB of memory on the Secure Agent machine.