Sunday, July 5, 2015

What is production?

In What is an application?, I propose a definition for "application" as "A set of capabilities provided to a user to enable them to satisfy their desires." But, there are many other terms that are undefined. Over the next several posts, I'll define each one. The most important (after application) is "production", so I'll start there.

Let's do this with a thought experiment. Pretend that your application only has a production, however you define it. This is where your users come and where you make your money (assuming you do). There is only the one instance and, because there's only one, no-one needs a name for it. It's just "the application" - there's nothing to confuse it with. Anytime you need to make a change, you go make it in "the application" and your users immediately see it. Sounds good, right?

Of course, no-one works like this, and for good reason. Some changes are small enough that they can be made directly where your users are interacting, but the vast majority of them are not. Most changes require several hours (if not days) of work, often collaborating between multiple people and are built in stages you don't want your users to see.

So, we distinguish between where users go for the "live" application and where developers work to make changes. Stand up a clone of production, except it doesn't have live users going to it, and call it "development". Developers can make changes to it knowing they are safe from affecting the business. Production remains the place where users satisfy their desires.

So far, it seems pretty clear what production vs. development is. Production is where users go (but not developers) and development is where developers go (but not users). And, from a developer's perspective, that would be enough.

There are more stakeholders in an application than just users and developers. At minimum, you have the business owners. They define what the application is meant to do - what desires the user is attempting to satisfy and what capabilities the user will have to do so. If communication was perfect, then the business owners could tell the developers "Do this" and be assured that the necessary changes would happen exactly as they intended. This also assumes developers will never make mistakes. In real life, neither statement is remotely true. Review of work requested is a fact of life. Business owners need to assure and control the quality of what they pay for. Hence, the name "QA" (or, sometimes, "QC", for quality control).

Some organizations choose to have such review occur within the development instance. This makes a lot of sense for smaller, newer, and/or slower projects who either cannot or do not need the ongoing cost of a separate instance. In most other projects, the shortcomings of this plan become obvious very quickly. Ongoing development makes it difficult to determine if a failure is because of the work under review or the unstable nature of the development instance. Business owners are uncertain what would happen to the production instance if they approve the work done for a request. Will the change for that request work properly when users try to exercise the new capability? Were the failures in that change or in something else?

We have development, QA/QC, and production. It's pretty obvious what "production" is - it's where the users are and it has to be stable with a managed and defined process for change.

So, where does a demonstration/demo or training environment fit? It's not the production, but it needs to be stable for a smaller set of users and a limited window of time. This is where a lot of organizations stumble, attempting to tie the demo or training instance to either the existing production (slow-changing) or QA (quick-changing) environments. Except, the business needs usually require a middle-ground between the two.

Which leads to the better definition of "production". Or, rather, splitting out what constitutes "production" into different knobs we can apply to other environments.

The first knob is change management. Different environments will change within different change control regimens. This knob is based on who decides when the environment changes. Development changes whenever a developer edits a file. QA changes whenever a developer finishes some work. Production, however, changes whenever the business feels a feature is both ready for use and appropriate for release. A demo or training environment will be similarly managed by the business, not the development teams.

The second knob is the stringency of review. We've already seen how changes to production will usually go through a QA environment first before a user will see it in production. Demo and training environments also need similar review because users will be in these environments.

So, what's the difference between production, training, and demo? From a developer's perspective, often nothing. They're all strongly controlled environments with reviewed changes pushed when the business wants them.

All of this discussion leads to this:
  1. Production is where users live.
  2. Production is where change control is at its maximum (whatever that is).
  3. Production is where data robustness is at its maximum. (To be discussed in a later post.)
  4. Production is where availability is at its maximum. (To be discussed in a later post.)
  5. Multiple environments can share aspects of Production and should be treated as such in those axes.

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