Assessments - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 432

• Deployments fail often.
Level 3: Defined
• What constitutes a successful deployment is defined.
• Minor and major releases are handled differently.
• The expected time gap between release availability and deployment is defined.
Level 4: Managed
• Deployment success/failure is measured against definitions.
• Deployments fail rarely.
• The expected time gap between release availability and deployment is measured.
Level 5: Optimizing
• Continuous deployment is in use.
• Failed deployments are extremely rare.
• New releases are deployed with little delay.
A.6 New Product Introduction and Removal (NPI/NPR)
New Product Introduction and Removal covers how new products and services are intro-
duced into the environment and how they are removed. This is a coordination function:
introducing a new product or service requires a support infrastructure that may touch mul-
tiple teams.
For example, before a new model of computer hardware is introduced into the datacen-
ter environment, certain teams must have access to sample hardware for testing and qual-
ification, the purchasing department must have a process to purchase the machines, and
datacenter technicians need documentation. For introducing software and services, there
shouldbetaskssuchasrequirementsgathering,evaluationandprocurement,licensing,and
creation of playbooks for the helpdesk and operations.
Productremovalmightinvolvefindingallmachineswithaparticularlyoldreleaseofan
operatingsystemandseeingthatallofthemgetupgraded.Productremovalrequiresidenti-
fying current users, agreeing on timelines for migrating them away, updating document-
ation, and eventually decommissioning the product, any associated licenses, maintenance
contracts, monitoring, andplaybooks.Themajority oftheworkconsists ofcommunication
and coordination between teams.