Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 7. Service Delivery and Operations

The service delivery and operations teams, which typically are based out of the data centers, take care of all the environments, servers, and systems. These are the folks you should work closely with to understand how the system should operate and be operated in live service. Because the teams have looked after many systems and learned many lessons over the years, they can provide great guidance and advice. Supporting the system should be as straightforward as possible. Manual procedures take time and are also prone to human error. The service delivery and operations teams can help you to define the operability criteria for the system. However, this needs to be considered and included in the scope appropriately. One of the most important documents pertaining to the system and its operation is the Operations Manual and you've already seen a number of the items that would typically be included it.

In addition to discussing the roles of the service delivery and operations teams, this chapter looks at the contents of a typical Operations Manual in more detail. You can use the Operations Manual as a roadmap for designing the overall solution. As you progress through the next few chapters, you'll see the various activities in more detail.

This chapter is organized into the following sections:

• The Three Levels of Live Service Support — This section provides an overview of the three different levels of support and how the individual teams interact. ...