Testing the preproduction environment
Performance testing the environment is critical before users begin accessing the systems. You can use this time to validate functionality as well as capacity, scalability, and performance of the systems. This gives you the chance to identify and resolve all potential errors or bottlenecks in the design. It is much better for you to find the flaws than for the users to discover them inadvertently.
Reviewing the design plan
Earlier, in Chapter 3, Designing Your Infrastructure, we laid out our general architecture plan and resource requirements. Of course, this was a paper exercise based on numerous assumptions. Now that everything is built, we can test and validate the assumptions. Should actual performance vary from our predictions—and it usually will—we can revise the baselines.
We should also take time to review our reference architecture against our final as-built architecture. Ideally, this should be the same. However, variations do occur occasionally...
