After six months of testing, tomorrow, July 12th 2022, NASA will announce the successful deployment to production of the James Webb Space Telescope!
Five targets have been selected as the first wave of scientific observations and the publication of their images marks the official beginning of Webb’s science operations.
Artist’s impression of the James Webb Space Telescope, ready for action! (NASA)
From a Site Reliablity Engineer’s perspective, this marks the moment when Webb moves from Day-1 operations to Day-2 operations.
What do I mean by this? During the lifecycle of developing new services, there are basically three stages , which we can metaphorically call “days”:
- Day 0 — This is the initial design and development of the service, from the collection of business requirements, creating a development plan, creating the initial MVPs and all the way to the actual creation of the service (including, of course, testing it in the proper environments).
- Day 1 — This is the moment the service goes live and can potentially start working. It’s the moment we click “deploy” and the solution gets pushed into the production environment. In theory, Day 1 could take a few minutes, but since we’re responsible people, we’ll stretch Day 1 out a bit, spending time and making an effort to be sure that everything is working properly before moving on to…
- Day 2 — This is the stage where our service is working properly and our customers are enjoying the fruits of our hard labour. At this point our solution is working in the production environment and we’re ready to solve any problems which might arise.
If you're interested in reading more,
the full article is available here.
You can read more about IBM’s
Day-2 Operations for RedHat OpenShift here and about Canary Deployments and Dark Launches as part of the
Cloud Service Management & Operations online course.
Robert