Key Considerations for IT Operational Service Best Practices
What does it mean to be operationally effective? The answer to this question is: It depends! In reality, it is based on many factors, but it all comes down to running and managing a solution during and after it is done. So, in this context, does “it” really mean “information technology” (IT) or does it mean just “it” – your system? We’ll let you decide as you read this chapter and see that without correct operational best practices IT devolves into a thing (“it”) that is not reliable, available, scalable, or performant.
With Agile and Lean development methodologies, that state of being done may never really occur. Alternatively, a product’s stage of being done may be attained only after it is ascribed a versioned release number and made generally available within one pass through the cycle. How IT gets done is iteratively defined by these cycles through the DevOps Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
In this chapter, we will explore the following topics:
- Service level agreements and service level management of (various) contracts
- Data contracts leading to quality data factory outputs
- Solution monitoring with observability capabilities
- System and data contract anomaly detection
- Blue/green deployment vs other release/deploy processes on operations (what are the tradeoffs?)
With this information, you will be able to build an operational framework with processes that are sustainable when your solution enters its run/manage phase.
