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JaMaCU Deployment Strategy

Motivation

Developers and architects have too long neglected the needs of system administration. The excuses
vary, but the symptoms are much the same;

  • Complex and time consuming deployments.
  • Complex and error prone configuration.
  • Too much, too little or just plain bad logging.
  • Poor or missing exception management.
  • "I do it my way" instead of "I do it the standard way".
  • Little or poor communication between sysadmins and developers.
  • etc.

Enough with the excuses!
We will here explain what we consider to be good practices for integrating and collaborating with system administrators and their systems and processes.

Goals
  • Make it easy to deploy an application in a new environment.
  • Describe a solution for Configuration Management based on sound [SOA ] principles and open source software.
  • Describe the relevant solutions and means we need to solve the most painful problems.
Prerequisites and assumptions

The documentation and examples are written in a Java and Unix/Linux context. While most of the ideas can (/ought to be) possible on Windows, we have opted to complete an end-to-end solution on one platform before expanding to multiple platforms. We have also chosen Confluence for documentation, Maven as build system and unix-maven-plugin for packaging.

The strategy is therefore called JaMaCU (Java, Maven, Confluence, Unix-maven-plugin).
Table of Contents - Maven-based Software Release - Installation and Deployment Automation - Confluence-based Documentation Release - ConfigService - Logging - Error Handling And Exception Management - States of a distributed application - SysAdmin Production Toolbox Legend - documentation good enough as guide - documentation NOT good enough as guide JaMaCU_graphical_overview