When you have an application ready and ready to go live in a cloud server environment, you may be wondering how you can improve your server environment to make the leap from “working” to a full production environment. This article will help you get start with planning and implementing a production environment by creating a loose definition of “production environment” in the context of a web application that resides in a cloud server environment, and demonstrate some of the components you can add to your existing architecture to make this transition.
To demonstrate this in practice, let’s assume we start with some configuration similar to the one describ in the Five Common Server Configurations article , such as this environment consisting of two servers serving some web application:
basic-server-setup
Your actual configuration may be simpler or more complex, but the general ideas and components we’ll discuss here should be somewhat applicable to any server environment.
We’ll start by defining what we mean by the phrase “production environment”.
What is a production environment?
The server environment for a web application, broadly speaking, consists of the hardware, software, data, operational plans, and personnel necessary to make the application work. By production environment we usually refer to some server environment that has been design and implement to ensure the best possible acceptable level of the following factors:
Availability (availability) . The app’s ability to be us by its intend users during the given hours of its operation. Availability can be interrupt by any failure that severely affects any of the critical components (eg, an application crashes due to an error, a database storage device stops working, or a system administrator shuts down an application server out of the blue). One of the ways to strengthen availability is to ruce the number of parts in the environment, the failure of which will cause the failure of the entire system (so-call SPOF, single point of failure ).
Recoverability . The server’s ability to
recover the application environment in the event of system failure or data loss. If a critical component fails that cannot be recover, there is no saudi arabia phone number data availability. Improving maintainability , a relat term, ruces the time requir to perform the appropriate recovery process in the event of a failure, and therefore can improve availability in the event of a failure.
Performance . The application works as expect under average load and at peak times (e.g. it responds reasonably quickly). Although it is very important to the user, it only matters landing pages are usually focus if the application is available.
Let’s now take some time to determine in the context of the application the acceptable level of all the elements just mention. They will be very different depending on the importance cmo email list and nature of the application for which we are setting them. For example, for a personal blog that serves only a small number of visitors, it can probably be accept that it has occasional downtime or poor performance.