Checklists for updating a production environment

[Q&A] General
1

we are going to update the revision number of the application in the production environment.
Besides the fact that we need to update the production environment outside working hours, are there any other facts that we should pay attention to?

2

Hello Reza,

There are a few things to look out for. Not sure if they are all usefull for the applciation you are trying to update as it depends what kind of changes are in your update.
The biggest impact here is if there are database changes yes or no.
Here are a few things that come to mind, with some links to other usefull posts.

  1. Is the updatescript performing? i.e. if you added a field with a default value on a table with millions of records that might take some time to fill them in the database. You don’t want your updatescript to last longer dan a 10 minutes. The best way to test this is by doing a dry-run on your acceptance environement on a fresh copy of the production database (DTAP Best practice, database copy tool)

  2. Did you check the system health on your acceptance environement and is it clean of errors? (System Health in Novulo) This is to notice any needed changes in configuration beforehand.

  3. When updating in early/late hours: make sure there is no server maintenance that your hosting provider is doing whil the update runs.

  4. If there are database changes: do you have new dataset versions with the changed rightsprofiles included in your installation? (Rights Profiles in Novulo and Using Datasets in Deployment: Transferring configuration data between DTAP instances)

  5. Check if there are any scheduled expected to be running while you want to start the update. Unregister them before the update and re-register them afterwards.
    You don’t want your update to stop a big important proces resulting in half finished processes or incomplete data. (i.e. a purchaseadvice for a retail customer needs to be finished every morning to that purchase employees).

  6. Have a backup plan in case you need to revert. As long as you don’t “Keep” the update in the installer you can revert the application and database to the state when the backup was created when you started the installation in the installer. It helps to know the impacts of a revert and until what moment a revert is still a good option.
    i.e.if your application has sales and customers you lose them if they are created after the installation is finished, but before the database backup is restored.

Hope this helps.

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3

Maybe out of scope for your question, but still:

At Maia, we always do a database copy first from production to our acceptance environment. Then we do the update incl. datasets to our acceptance. Now we have recreated what it’ll be like when we update to our production environment.

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4

What is also something not to forget, is to have the Rights Profiles prepared in your DTAP environment so you can include these.
Updates can add fields that the updated application needs, so adjustments can be necesary.

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