Purpose of the Product
To name a standard set of steps, or operations, with which the work of providing software application services can be largely automated.
Desire for Named Operations
Because the work of application service provision responds to new releases of the provided software applications, much of the work is occasional and irregular.
Close manual administration is error prone because it's hard manually to keep track of where everything is and what everything has been called. Even worse, because of the extended nature of the activity, when you come back to it you can always think of better ways of doing things, and it can be hard to maintain a standard (and simplifying) scheme for naming things, laying things out, setting things up, and moving things on.
Therefore, we wanted to name a standard set of steps, or operations, with which the work of providing application services can be entirely automated. We wanted to be able to direct repeatable sequences with a set of canned scripts, without any loss of underlying control over the deployment, and without any constraints on the variation between applications. The sequences would help the service provider effect state transitions with minimal key strokes.
- acquire instructions for new release
- take in new release for testing
- examine results of functional tests
- visit acceptance testing service
- put new release into production
- reject release
Scope of the Work
The Provide system supports the user stories below.
- Acquire instructions for deployment of provided software application as a service.
- Prepare space for deploying a particular software system as an application service.
- Establish a purpose designation for a software application service.
- Acquire a particular version of a software application.
- Deploy software application for functional testing.
- Deploy software application for acceptance testing.
- Deploy software application for production usage.
- Initialize deployed software application with default domain data.
- Initialize deployed software application with dumped domain data.
- Designate software application service with a purpose.
- Show which application service is designated for a particular purpose.
- Dump domain data from an application service.
- Acquire instructions for migrating domain data from one version to another.
- Migrate domain data dump between two different software service versions.
- Designate application service as down for maintenance.
- List application service provision entities.
- Remove domain data dump from a service.
- Remove software application service.
- Remove distribution of software application release.
- Remove application service provision system.
The tutorial on the Documentation page describes how to use the Provide system.
Scope of the System
There is, pretty much, one Provide command for each user story listed above. Refer to the Provide user tutorial on the Documentation page for detailed information.