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.

Knowledge and information management

Knowledge and information management is one of the building blocks in an effective Operations department. It is really important to get a content management system in place before starting to build a production system. If you DO NOT do this, you and your team will suffer from the following:

• equipment inventory details will be stored only in your Purchase Orders, most likely kept in your mailbox
• low level design details can be found only in emails asking to perform cable wiring, or will be lost at all
• many versions of systems design documents will be managed in emails or in locally stored documents, making it almost impossible to trace down and identify the latest versions
• the documentation for managed systems will simply not exist since there is no place to store it
• and many other problems related to the lack of a central place to store and manage all required information about the system

Why have I started this blog?

My reason for starting this blog is to share my knowledge and experience in building and managing large production systems.