How to start?

Some people ask me - how to start building a production system, and make sure that it will be reliable, scaleable and manageable when it will outgrow two cabinets in one location (a kind of my definition of a small system)?

Start with breaking down the large task to small pieces. The following are some examples of "small pieces":

• Select the OS platform and distribution to go with (if your R&D leaves you a choice)
• Select the hardware platform

Operations requirements for in-house R&D products

This post will help you to define specific requirements from Operations to R&D for all in-house software provided for production deployment if you faced with in-house R&D products.

Once the requirements are modified to suit the specific environment, they should be discussed with your company's R&D manager, and approved by both parties. From the moment all new software products should compliant with the standard, and a strict timetable should be defined to fix all existing products (and expect that this will take some time).

Packaging and package names
All in-house software should be packaged using the standard packaging format supported by used operating system: RPM for RHEL/CentOS, DEB for Debian-like systems, etc.