Enterprise Architect's Best Friend Is Production System Engineer
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by dariorug |
Why Should You Care About Production System Engineer
Production system engineer is the guy you should give special treatment. Why? Because she is to maintain your system in production. If you build a better system from operations perspective, it'd get a better treatment during the production by the system engineer. If the system will have better treatment it'd better treat it's end users. Connecting the dots?
What Production System Engineer Cares The Most?
From my observations this is what Production System Engineers Care the most:
- What do I check when end users ask me the following questions?
- Why it is not working?
- Why it works so slow?
- Why I am not allowed to do this operation?
- How do I configure this?
- What alerts your system raises when it fails?
- Where all alerts are sent?
- How do I roll back the version?
- What should I do when I see specific alert?
- How do I distribute patches for your system?
- How do I know what is the source of the incident?
- How do I get detailed information regarding the incident?
- How do I recognizes the trends that usually lead to incident?
- How do I back up the configuration?
Conclusion
Make friends with Production System Engineer. Ask her tons of questions, know her pains, offer the solutions that relives the pain, or bettor off removes it completely.
What else should an Architect take into account when thinking about operations and Production System Engineer? What's your take?
Related Materials
- Design For Operations [DFO] – Problems And Solution Frame
- Do You Really Need A Distributed Architecture?
This post is made with PracticeThis.com plugin for Windows Live Writer
Comments
- Anonymous
February 10, 2009
My "Introduction to Consulting" was from--of all people--a grizzled Oracle engineer. He provided three pieces of advice with which I now do my best to follow at each-&-every engagement:1) Once you're able to take a peek at the target systems, look thoughtful, turn to stakeholders & say, "It's worse than I thought". (He was half-kidding, yet it's too often the truth!)2) Latency is what matters in terms of the user experience--whether it's network, CPU, memory, or disk, bottlenecks are established by focusing on latency, not queues.3) Make the production engineer your ally. - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
We are absolutely aligned in this regard! - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
Another good friend of a production system engineer is writing and maintaining smart scripts. These will guide through a problem with less time and effort. - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
bani,Good point.What are the best scripts that "saved lives" of production engineers?Feel free to post links here - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
Hi Alik,For extra credit the Architect could/should shadow the SE during an upgrade to really experience their pain, even better offer to take the pager for a weekend and handle any of the alerts in the live environment. After doing this they'll have a great understanding of the support effort. - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
James,Not sure, here....If it happens, the Architect would build absolutely perfect system from operations perspective, and that would threaten on me and you. You and I live and breathe production debugging, and perf bottlenecks... in case it disappears.... we become jobless...HAHAAHAHAHAHAHA!!LOL! Good point, partner! - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
Data and technical complexities can seem to be a labryinth to individuals no accustomed to using them. At the same time, it is by exploring the unknown that a person can come full circle and arrive face-to-face with one's true self. - Anonymous
February 10, 2009
Liara,That's exactly the point of the post. Calling the Architect to meet the unknown, the Production System Engineer ;)Once the Architect meets him face-to-face he will discover his true self, no doubt! ;)