From testing and development to production
This blog along with a few other sites are on a testing server that is supported by IST. The idea is one LAMP box for development and testing with another for production. This idea works well but a recent outage has me thinking…
Here are some questions going through my mind:
- The testing server is used for both development of web pages and testing of new web technologies – what happens when they don’t mix well? The development of web pages has to stop because some technology has taken down the server.
- What is the priority to get the development server fixed? In the case of pole (the server this is on at the moment), it was down all of Sunday and early today because of configuration issues. If I planned on working Sunday (hope that day never comes) it would be down and so would my day of development.
- What technologies should be tested, would we want something like PHP 5 on there when we are developing PHP applications? I could imagine a few problems if we developed an application in PHP 5 but the produciton server was only running 4.
- When do we move something from testing to production? This blog is just an experiment, should it go over to production?
A sys admin might have a different set of questions or problems but the down time has me thinking. My first thought would be to have UML for the technologies but we would still have to have better co-ordination. For the moment it appears a lot of people could potentionally have a hand is messing up the development box. Better communication might be needed as to who is doing what and when. For now things are great, no real compliants. Just the recent outage has me thinking.
