Sunday, March 22, 2009

Deployment: March 21, 2009

This should have been a fairly typical deployment. We were putting in a new J2EE application, with a database change. The minor difference between this one and my normal deployments is that this wasn’t an update, it was a brand new J2EE application; so if we screwed up, and it wasn’t properly deployed on time, we wouldn’t have to roll back to a previous version.

22:00–22:01 (1 minute): We all logged onto the conference bridge, and confirmed that we were ready to go.

22:01–23:33 (1 hour and 32 minutes): The DBA ran the database scripts. There were some errors, so this took a lot longer than expected, but she managed to work through the problems and get everything done.

22:01–22:34 (33 minutes): We configured the J2EE cluster (connection pools, security, etc.). We then had to wait for the database scripts to be finished, to move on to the next part of the deployment.

23:33–02:30 (2 hours, 57 minutes): We deployed the J2EE application. Again, there were difficulties, which were hard to troubleshoot, because they had to do with some internal workings of our vendor’s software, rather than our own code. We were getting errors between the vendor’s software and their database objects. After troubleshooting as much as we could, we called it a night.

Overall deployment: 22:00–02:30 (4 hours and 30 minutes). We left the bridge knowing that there was a good chance we’d need to rebuild the environment from scratch; it was quite possibly a configuration issue, but the likelihood of being able to track it down was slim. We tentatively planned to retry the next night, schedules (and permissions) pending.

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