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

Full Size