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Last active August 29, 2015 14:05
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Thoughts on baseline requirements for deploying a server applicaiton to production.
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production-ready.md

Operations Team should not deploy a new software application to production unless the Development Team complies with the following minimum requirements:

Software Requirements

  • Packaging: the application must conform to conventions for configuration, directory structure and run scripts:

    • Configuration
    • Deployment Build
    • Run script

  • Reference Configuration: The reference configuration file included in the package must:

    • be free of settings specific to a single user's development environment, such as a local file path that only exists on the developer's work station (/home/nzucker/projects/tmpdata)
    • have in-line documentation explaining each setting (or individually or in blocks).

  • Log File Locations and Format: the application must generate log files that:

  • have names and locations that are defined via configuration (i.e. not hard-coded in compiled source code).

  • have names and locations that can be cleaned up / rotated by the standard operations procedures.

  • have contents that can be parsed and loaded into a log monitoring tool like LogStash.

  • Logging Configuration: If log configuration is file-based (i.e. logback.xml), the config file must be located in the standard configuration directory (i.e. not packaged and loaded from a JAR).

  • Versioning: on startup, the application must log its version number.

    • Alternatively, the application must provide a "version" command (e.g. ./start-app.sh --version)
    • The version number must exactly match a specific tag and/or commit ID ("hash") in source control.

Additional Requirements

  • Contact List
    • Lead Developer Contact
    • Backup Developer Contact
    • Product Owner / Sponsor
  • Run Book

Recommended

The following checklist items are not strictly required to get an application into Production, but having them will make production support much easer:

  • The application should send an email when serious/unexpected errors occur.
    • Long-running jobs (such as end of day or batch reporting procedures) should send emails upon start, completion and critical/fatal errors.
    • The "To" address of such emails should be configurable (but with a sensible default)
  • The application should have RESTful endpoint(s) that a monitoring tool can query for serious application error, liveness or "excessive load" conditions.
  • The application should run with an a performance monitoring agent (such as New Relic or AppDynamics), so Development can investigate performance and error conditions.
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