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

5.5. Summary

The production environment is the most critical environment of all (once the system is actually in live service). It is sized and scaled to meet the requirements and it includes many fault-tolerant and high availability features. The operations architecture is in place to support the production environment and ensure that it is up and running and kept in good working order.

This chapter looked at some of the servers and what they typically perform, as well as how each server provides fault-tolerant internal components.

The following are the key points to take away from this chapter:

• Understand the production environment. The production environment is critical and it is important to understand it thoroughly. Each application will have its own requirements for fault tolerance and deployment. It is important that the production environment be sized and scaled appropriately and you should consider the following when defining the production architecture and enviroment:

  • Date and time synchronization — When the date and time differ from server to server, it'sdifficult to piece together a real timeline, as the date and times could be different across the estate.

  • Third-party components — You should understand whether agents will need to be deployed to the servers and whether they can support the necessary high availability features.

  • Application deployment — The application components need to be packaged such that they can be easily deployed around the environment.

  • Monitoring and ...