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

Chapter 5. The Production Environment

The production environment is the foundation of the production system. It encompasses both the solution architecture and the operations architecture. It can also involve multiple data centers for fault tolerance and disaster recovery. This chapter examines a hypothetical, medium-scale, highly resilient, and scalable production environment. It also re-enforces the importance of and the techniques for designing a production architecture (and solution) that is fit for purpose and meets all the necessary quality characteristics from both a hardware and software perspective.

This chapter is organized into the following sections:

• The Big Picture — Examines the architecture hardware diagram, including the solutions architecture and the operations architecture environments. The architecture hardware diagram is a snapshot view of the overall production environment showing the different hardware (servers and network components) it encompasses.

• The Hardware Topology — Examines the usage and resiliency of individual server groups. It also looks at the high availability and fault-tolerant features of the architecture, along with some items that should be considered. It examines shared storage for use by the application by making use of the SAN. And, finally, it takes a quick look at network segmentation which can be employed for improved security and performance.

• The Software Topology — Describes how the software topology is put together, examining each ...