Dl/Product Release Checklist

Logging

• Your application should emit loggings that helps to diagnose your product.
• You should use a centralized logging system so it is easy to search logs from different service/component of your product.
• Your logging should not contain sensitive information or offensive words.

Metrics

• Your application should emit telemetrics (time series) to a metrics system (e.g. AWS Cloud Watch)
• You should have a centrailzed UI to watch telemetrics from different service/component of your product

Alarms

• You should define alarms based on your telemetrics
• The alarm should be able to notify your devop, for example, via pagerduty

Security

• Security vulnerability assessment
  • Make sure your product does not have security vulnerabilities

• Access Control
  • prevent unauthorized access to protected information
    • access could be "read", "write", "delete", "list", etc.

• Access Audit
  • Make sure access to the product is tracked, tracked information should include:
    • Who is accessing?
    • What kind of access? (read/write/delete/list/etc...)
    • When the access happened
    • What has been accessed?
  • access audit log should be organized in such way that is easy to search
  • access audit log should be retained in reasonable time, also the retained duration should comply to government regulations.

• SSO Authentication
  • Your Web UI should use SSO to authenticate user. An anti pattern is to have your product maintain it's own username/password, (e.g. current Airflow for Tier-1 and Tier-2)
    • Having 4~5 products with each maintain their own username and password is a nightmare!

Service Availability

• Highly Available
  • Your service should be highly available. A common pattern is haing redundancy, so if your active server is down, your standby server can take over the control. And we expect the switch to be automatic.

Capacity

• You should deploy your service over the day-to-day capacity. For example, you should be prepared your service to handle 200% of traffic comparing your normal traffic.
• You should have "capacity review" constantly, a common practice is to review capacity every year, and book the capacity for the entire year (with predicted growth)

Beta Environment

• For any product, you should have a beta environment
• You should always deploy your change to beta environment first, verify nothing is broken before deploy to production.

User facing document

• Any product should have a user facing document.
• User facing document should be in sync with product evolvement