Operations in a Distributed World - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 158

- Has the security team audited and approved the service?
- Has a privacy audit been completed and all issues remediated?
Because alaunchiscomplex,withmanymovingparts,werecommend thatasingleperson
(the launch lead ) take a leadership or coordinator role. If the developer and operations
teams are very separate, one person from each might be selected to represent each team.
The launch lead then works through the checklist, delegating work, filing bugs for any
omissions, and tracking all issues until launch is approved and executed. The launch lead
may also be responsible for coordinating post-launch problem resolution.
Case Study: Self-Service Launches at Google
Googlelaunches somanyservices thatitneededawaytomakethelaunchprocess
streamlinedandabletobeinitiatedindependentlybyateam.Inadditiontoprovid-
ing APIs and portals for the technical parts, the Launch Readiness Review (LRR)
made the launch process itself self-service.
The LRR included a checklist and instructions on how to achieve each item.
An SRE engineer was assigned to shepherd the team through the process and hold
them to some very high standards.
Some checklist items were technical—for example, making sure that the
Google load balancing system was used properly. Other items were caution-ary, to
preventalaunchteamfromrepeatingotherteams'pastmistakes.Forexample,one
team had a failed launch because it received 10 times more users than expected.
There was no plan for how to handle this situation. The LRR checklist required
teams to create a plan to handle this situation and demonstrate that it had been
tested ahead of time.
Other checklist items were business related. Marketing, legal, and other depart-
mentswererequiredtosignoffonthelaunch.Eachdepartmenthaditsowncheck-
list. The SRE team made the service visible externally only after verifying that all
of those sign-offs were complete.
7.2.2 Service Decommissioning
Decommissioning (or just “decomm”), or turning off a service, involves three major
phases: removal of users, deallocation of resources, and disposal of resources.
Removing users is often a product management task. Usually it involves making the
users aware that they must move. Sometimes it is a technical issue of moving them to an-
other service. User data may need to be moved or archived.