Deployment considerations for CAST Imaging

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Info

Summary: information to help you plan your AIP for Imaging installation.

Typical communication between CAST components

The following diagram shows the interaction between AIP Console and the main CAST Components. It also shows the flow from the source code delivery to the CAST Imaging data consumption:

Required components

Package/Component

Description

CAST Imaging

CAST Imaging is the component used to display and investigate the analysis results:

This component can be installed on Windows (directly or via Docker) or Linux (via Docker).
Only one instance can be "fed" with analysis results.

AIP Core

AIP Core is the "backbone" analysis engine:

Hardware requirements for CAST Imaging

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Info

Note that:

hardware requirements depend on various factors related to the Application(s) you are analyzing and these must be considered:
- Number of lines of code (LOC)
- Number of objects after analysis
- Number of violations after analysis
- Technologies used
- Number of users accessing results
due to the different factors that need to be considered, it is difficult to make precise hardware recommendations, therefore what we provide in this page is indicative only. We provide these figures as a guide to the absolute minimum required to run AIP Console and all required components, and your own configuration will likely require better hardware.
using storage/disk with high IOPS values (i.e. SSD disks or SANs configured with SSD) will bring better performance. This is particularly true for servers hosting AIP Core/AIP Node and PostgreSQL components where faster storage will improve analysis performance.
installations of AIP Core/AIP Node on servers with resources that are lower than the minimum required or that barely meet the minimum requirements will have the following limitations:
- analysis runtime and SQL operations will be sub-optimal
- you cannot run more than one application in parallel
- disk space can be quickly overloaded

On-premises

Multi-node (Large/Enterprise) - minimum requirements

With AIP Console v. 2.x

Component

Software requirements for CAST Imaging

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Info

Summary: information to help you plan your AIP for Imaging

installation.

CAST Imaging

Traditional installer for Microsoft Windows

Software

Required

Notes

Host Operating System

✅

Microsoft Windows

Windows 10
Windows 11
Windows Server 2025 (64bit) - supported in CAST Imaging ≥ 1.6.0
Windows Server 2022 (64bit) - supported in CAST Imaging ≥ 1.6.0
Windows Server 2019 (64bit) - supported in CAST Imaging ≥ 1.6.0
Windows Server 2016 (64bit)

Installations of Windows Server using only Server Core (i.e. without a GUI) are not supported.

CAST Imaging architecture

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

CAST Imaging is a collection of different “services” that function as one. Below is an illustration of these services:

Click to enlarge


Imaging exporter	This component works independently and is based on Python programming language. It is used to export data from CAST Analysis schema and store all the data related to Transactions, Objects, Links, Modules, Architecture model, Data Call Graphs, etc. It converts the extracted data into CSV format which can then be used by the ETL service for further processing and storage in another database called Neo4j. Click to enlarge
Proxy(Nginx)/Imaging Web (Imaging Front-End)	The user interface which interacts with the login component for authentication for every user request. It is a React framework based application deployed through the Nginx web server.
Login service	Each request from the front-end to the back-end services passes through the login service which authenticates the user’s request validity. The Login component talks to all the three services, Imaging service, ETL service and Source code service as per the request of the users. The login service is a Spring MVC based application. It provides various modes of Authentication such as local, LDAP, SAML and Active Directory.
Imaging service	Imaging service is created using “go” language. It interacts with Neo4j to fetch, save and update all the graph-related data and the data related to the users and the user license.
ETL service	Extract, Transfer and Load (ETL) service also uses the “go” language and is used to import and remove applications for a user. It uses the data extracted by Imaging Exporter and store it in a Neo4j database using the bolt protocol.
Source Code service	The Source code service is written using the Spring Boot framework. It is used to fetch the source code for a particular object from the SQL database through the HTTP/HTTPS protocol.
Neo4j	Neo4j is a graph database management system. It stores all the Imaging graph related data and various other information about the user and license.

Prerequisites for CAST Imaging on Documentation - V2

Deployment considerations for CAST Imaging

Typical communication between CAST components

Required components

Hardware requirements for CAST Imaging

On-premises

Multi-node (Large/Enterprise) - minimum requirements

With AIP Console v. 2.x

Software requirements for CAST Imaging

CAST Imaging

Traditional installer for Microsoft Windows

CAST Imaging architecture