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What is production ready?

This is the NAIS team's attempt to define what production ready means to us. Production implies quality and durability. Running a system means serving requests, and requests are ultimately serving users. We care about our users, thus we must care about our systems.

At NAIS, we strive to:

  • provide fully self serviced products with minimal downtime,
  • be confident that code changes will not break existing functionality,
  • respond quickly when systems fail,
  • spend minimal time fixing errors,
  • and most importantly: spend as much time possible implementing useful services for our users. (you!)

We believe that if our systems conform to the principles in this document, we have a greater chance of achieving these goals.

12 factor app

Write your application according to the principles of 12 factor apps.

Twelve factor apps:

  • have declarative system requirements,
  • are suitable for deployment in Docker containers,
  • do not have differences between development and production, and
  • can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices.

Observability

Expose a Prometheus metric endpoint to allow scraping of key application metrics.

Measuring success

Figure out service level indicators (SLI) and service level objectives (SLO).

Service level indicators are quantifying metrics such as error rate, request latency, availability, and system throughput.

Service level objectives are targets values for your metrics. You might say that you want an uptime of 99.9%. How do you define uptime? Is it a sufficiently low error rate? Is it being able to serve requests within a reasonable amount of time?

Implement SLIs in the application code. Create views in a Grafana dashboard to check up on SLOs.

Recommended read: Service Level Objectives in the Google Site Reliability Engineering handbook.

Alerts

Alerts should be tied to SLOs. Consider if alerting is at all needed. An alert should only fire if human intervention is required. Too many alerts going off will result in alarm fatigue.

Relevant logs

Ensure traceability of errors by logging sufficient amount of debug information. Do not include sensitive data in logs. Sensitive data include credentials and personally identifyable information.

Tests

Ensure sufficient test coverage so that the next developer is not afraid of breaking things when updating your code.

Documentation

  • Development/building
  • End-user documentation
  • Sysadmin/maintenance
  • Document code where it is complex, hard to read, or otherwise obscure

Continuous Integration

Ensure that changes to the codebase are built automatically, and pushed to development and production environments. No manual steps other than git push should be neccessary.

Publish and announce

Your system is not in production until it has users. Make sure all potential end users are aware of your system and can use it. Using a system means making requests and having access to support and documentation.

Decrease bus factor

Ensure that at least two people on your team have sufficient knowledge to debug and work on the system, to avoid bus factor.

Data Protection Impact Assessment

Perform, if applicable, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (or in Norwegian, personvernskonsekvensvurdering (PVK)).

Security Audit

Perform a security audit (ROS) before releasing to production.