Sunday, December 2, 2007

Deployment: December 2, 2007

Finally. We finally got this thing deployed. After all of the false starts and number of times the release was deferred, it seems anti-climactic to have such a short post for this release, but the fact is, when we finally got a chance to deploy this thing, it went without a hitch.

1:30AM: We all logged onto the conference bridge, and confirmed we were ready to go.

1:35: We shut down the two applications that we had to deploy, for this release—the “front-end” app and the “back-end” app.

1:40: We backed up the database for the front-end app, and began the deployment of the back-end app. I can’t stress enough the importance of having a good, solid deployment plan, so that you can execute tasks in parallel like this, and not worry about losing track of who’s doing what!

1:45: The backup finished for the database, so our Database Analyst (DBA) began executing the new database scripts.

1:45: As the DBA executed the DB scripts, the back-end app was taking a bit longer than expected to come back up.

1:50: The back-end app came back up, and the DBA finished executing the scripts. We did our Sanity Test for the back-end app.

2:00: Sanity tests for the back-end app passed. We now began the deployment of the front-end app. (Because it depends on the back-end app, we had to ensure that the back-end app was up and running properly, before bothering to deploy the new version of the front-end app.)

2:05: The front-end app finished deploying, and we began our Sanity testing. At this point, we were about an hour ahead of schedule.

2:20: Sanity testing finished. We now got the clients to begin their Landing tests. We actually had to call some people, and get them to join the bridge early, since we were still ahead of schedule.

2:20–5:00: We performed Landing tests. We turned up two defects, but they were deemed minor enough that we could leave the release in, until a fix could be found.

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