Supporting Production Systems

In software development and operations, production systems are the instances of applications and services that are actively in use by end users. Once we build and release a network-accessible software system, it is said to be running in a production environment rather than a development, staging, or test environment. The activities that engineering and operations teams engage in to keep production systems available and troubleshoot operational issues are collectively known as production support.

Production support is an area with vastly different practices and norms depending on the company, industry, and customer expectations. In large technology organizations, it may be highly formalized across the company as site reliability engineering. In software-as-a-service (SaaS) settings with business customers, there are typically contracts with specific performance metrics that must be adhered to. Consumer product companies may vary widely in their approach...