Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 15. Going Production

Chapter 15. Going Production

Putting your directory service into production is a big step. It is what you have been working toward as you have developed an understanding of directory services and your own needs, created a detailed design, and performed a directory service pilot. Because you get only one chance to make a good first impression , it is important to execute well at this stage.

In conducting your pilot, you learned a lot about what is involved in rolling out and running a directory service. Following are the ways production directory services are different from a pilot directory service:

• Expectations are dramatically higher.   People expect a higher level of service, including good performance, minimal downtime, and absolutely no loss of data. To meet these expectations, you need to monitor your service and have staff on call to fix problems as soon as they are detected .

• The audience for your service is significantly larger.   You will add to the early adopters who made use of your pilot a large set of people who view computing services simply as tools to help them get their jobs done. This type of user demands an easy-to-use, well-documented, and well-supported service.

• The scope and scale of your service may expand greatly.   In a typical pilot deployment, not all the servers and applications that you plan to use in your production service are online. Production servers are also often deployed on larger machines than pilot servers, and the larger machines may require more care and feeding for backups and other maintenance tasks .

• Monitoring and troubleshooting responsibilities are increased.   The people deploying the directory service have a greater responsibility to keep an eye on the service and be available to fix problems that arise. This is really a consequence of the increased expectations and larger audience for the service.

Throughout this chapter, we assume that your directory service deployment is fairly large and complex. Therefore, we place a lot of emphasis on written plans and communication among the people participating in the production rollout. If your deployment is small, you can safely use less-formal methods of communication. Whether it is large or small, you can win many supporters for your service simply by providing a useful, reliable service right from the start and telling people about it.

The best way to achieve a successful production rollout is to start with a comprehensive plan. The first section of this chapter helps you create such a plan. After that, we present some advice to help you succeed with your production deployment. We finish up with a discussion on how to execute your plan successfully.

Index terms contained in this section

audiences

          production vs. pilot directories

directories

          production

                    expanded scope and scale

                    high expectations

                    large audiences

                    trouleshooting

expectations

          production vs. pilot directories

monitoring

         directories

                    production vs. pilot

production directories

         vs. pilot directories

                    expaned scope and scale

                    higher expectations

                    large audiences

                    troubleshooting

scalability

scope

          production vs. pilot directories

troubleshooting

         directories

                    production vs. pilot

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