Operations in a Distributed World - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 156

velopment. Such a team has “done their homework”; they have been working on the items
in the checklist in parallel as the product was being developed. This does not happen by
accident; the checklist must be available, be advertised, and become part of the company
culture.
A simple strategy is to create a checklist of actions that need to be completed prior to
launch.Amoresophisticated strategyisforthechecklist tobeaseriesofquestionsthatare
audited by a Launch Readiness Engineer (LRE) or a Launch Committee.
Here is a sample launch readiness review checklist:
Sample Launch Readiness Review Survey
The purpose of this document is to gather information to be evaluated by a Launch
Readiness Engineer (LRE) when approving the launch of a new service. Please complete
the survey prior to meeting with your LRE.
• General Launch Information:
- What is the service name?
- When is the launch date/time?
- Is this a soft or hard launch?
• Architecture:
- Describe the system architecture. Link to architecture documents if possible.
- How does the failover work in the event of single-machine, rack, and data-
center failure?
- How is the system designed to scale under normal conditions?
• Capacity:
- What is the expected initial volume of users and QPS?
- How was this number arrived at? (Link to load tests and reports.)
- What is expected to happen if the initial volume is 2 × expected? 5 × ? (Link to
emergency capacity documents.)
- What is the expected external (internet) bandwidth usage?
- What are the requirements for network and storage after 1, 3, and 12 months?
(Link to confirmation documents from the network and storage teams capa-
city planner.)
• Dependencies:
- Which systems does this depend on? (Link to dependency/data flow dia-
gram.)