• Production Readiness Checklist
• Infrastructure Event Readiness
• Launch Checklist
• Black Friday Production Readiness

In this episode, I wanted to raise awareness to a few great DevOps Launch Checklists. The idea here, is these checklists give you a pretty solid foundation, for things to be thinking about when deploying workloads into the cloud. But, I also wanted to point you at a few really useful documents, around planning large launch events where you expect a massive influx of traffic.

So, lets dive in.

Gruntwork Production Readiness Checklist

If you are using AWS, Gruntwork has this pretty cool site, called “Production Readiness Checklist”. Where they suggest a bunch of best practices for deploying infrastructure into AWS. Really good topics, like HA, CI/CD, Monitoring, and Cost optimization. Chances are you will not use everything here. But, embedded in each area here, are lots of really helpful links to various AWS resources. So, this can be pretty useful for getting a lay of the land.

AWS Infrastructure Event Readiness Guide

The second thing I wanted to share was around planning for an event where you expect a huge influx of traffic. Say for example, that you’re working at a retail company, that is expecting a massive amount of user traffic over the holidays. How, do you go about planning for something like that. Well, AWS published a pretty useful guide on that, and it walks you through a bunch of best practices on Infrastructure Event Readiness. Most companies will go through something like this, maybe it is a large marketing event, or you’re launching a new product, or maybe some holiday sales. We likely all deal with this from time to time and just knowing these things exist if you need them can be pretty useful.

GCP Platform Launch Checklist

Google Cloud has pretty much the same thing. They have a Launch Checklist that walks you through a bunch of best practices for launching your applications on GCP. There is likely a bunch of overlap from the Gruntwork page too. As, you likely will care about the same things, like HA, CI/CD, Monitoring, Cost optimization, etc. But, I have used this page quite a bit as it give you a nice little framework think plan around.

Black Friday Production Readiness Guide

I have been saving the best for last here. This Black Friday Production Readiness page is probably one of the best guides around for planning a large scale event where you expect huge amounts of traffic. The guide alone will probably take you a few hours to work through but gives a very detailed step-by-step guide on what you need to do. Things like team communication, planning, load testing, logging, monitoring, creating a game day war room. This give you a peak under the covers of what large companies are doing when they launch things. For example, this is also what many on-line game studios go through too when they launch something. They typically go from zero traffic, to hundreds of thousands of active users, in minutes. So, you need a really good plan for making that a smooth launch.

There are a ton of episode ideas in here, around things like how to actually do things like, load testing, capacity planning, looking for single points of failure in an architecture, etc. But, I just wanted to quickly show you that these guides exist. I cannot recommend this Black Friday Production Readiness page enough if you have something like this planned. You can pick and choose what you want to implement but this is extremely detailed and works really well. I have used this guide multiple times. Sure, things don’t always go super smooth when you launch something, but having something like this is much better than nothing.

Alright, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for watching and see you next week. Bye.