Most organizations do not have the concept of a golden configuration and middleware technologies are managed and deployed in an uncontrolled manner. Find out more about how deployment automation can help you overcome these challenges

1. The Golden
Configuration:
Right First Time,
Every Time

2. The Golden Configuration: Right First Time, Every Time 1
The Current Landscape
Most organizations do not have the concept of a golden configuration
and middleware technologies are managed and deployed in an
uncontrolled manner. During the development lifecycle from dev to prod
different teams are involved. Also, different people may deploy
technologies in different ways and have their own scripts. Worryingly,
enterprise infrastructure is not deployed with the same rigor and
discipline as code is: people deploy different templates and patterns for
the same things, or worse still, they may manually make configuration
changes to different environments via GUI clicks.
The Consequences
All the above means that management of complex Enterprise
Infrastructure in a medium to large enterprise is fraught with difficulties;
no-one has a single view of what is happening and there is no
consistency between one environment to the next. The result? Your
organization requires a huge number of resources, deployments are
slow and onerous, lack of consistency leads to errors and this leads to
unacceptable levels of risk when deploying into your critical production
environments.
A Solution - Introducing the Golden
Configuration
Changing this situation can be challenging: it requires process
reorganization and technology can help. A single suite of Application
Release Automation technologies (ARA) such as RapidDeploy can
help.
One way of ensuring consistency is to use the concept of starting from
a Golden Configuration which all environments are built on. This can
either be built from scratch, or one can take existing infrastructure, and
use it as the basis to move forward. In the case of established
infrastructure, RapidDeploy can be used to easily reach out to a given
environment and import a snapshot of the artefacts and configuration.
Once we have this snapshot, it is beneficial to externalize out the
environment specific configuration, leaving a set of environment neutral
artefacts: we can refer to this as modelling, which would require the
input of various teams (e.g. design, development, operations). The
combination of a single set of artefacts for a given project and multiple

3. The Golden Configuration: Right First Time, Every Time
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configurations for each environment are combined to form a single
package which can be deployed across the development lifecycle in a
consistent and error free manner:
The advantage now is that we can use our deployment technology to
ensure that we always deploy to all our environments the same
way. The artefacts remain the same, but the externalized configuration
for each specific environment changes. By using a Golden
Configuration throughout the deployment lifecycle we ensure that we
are always consistent.
In the diagram below, we see how our Golden Configuration can be
used to easily clone new environments. All new environments for a
given project would be cloned the same way, from the same core set of
artefacts:

4. The Golden Configuration: Right First Time, Every Time 3
Once we get to production, we would expect our deployment package
for a given project to consist of a single set of neutral artefacts
combined with multiple configurations for all our environments.
Our packages could be technology specific or contain composite
technologies. For WMQ we would have a single set of mqsc
definitions, and our configuration would contain the various attributes
we would like to change e.g. sender channel connection names,
maximum message lengths, queue depths etc. For WMB we would
have a single set of BAR files and we would then have configuration to
specify properties of BAR files to override, configurable services etc.
In conclusion, we can see how the combination of technology and
some careful analysis up-front can yield enormous benefits, allowing an
organization to manage and scale hugely complex
and heterogeneous technologies across the enterprise quickly,
accurately and efficiently.

5. The Golden Configuration: Right First Time, Every Time
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You can request a free trial of RapidDeploy to help you create a
golden configuration here.