Re: taking deployment/operations considerations into account

Hassan,

It actually is somewhat unusual to see developers control 100% of the  
configuration.  Security requirements today dictate that critical  
values such as production database passwords should not be known to  
developers.  They certainly should not be kept in a version control  
system... which I presume would be the source of configuration  
information for the WAR file builds.

More generally, though, administrators need the ability to change  
configuration settings without going "upstream" to development.  I'll  
give you a few examples:

1. IT needs to re-address the data center network to compress  
subnets.  (Not routine, but it does happen.)
2. Developers configured applications to use a database host's IP  
address instead of the virtual IP address of the cluster.
3. Approaching the holidays, a retailer might decrease session  
timeouts, decrease cache sizes, and increase connection pool sizes.

I have seen companies in which IT administrators refuse to take on any  
responsibility for software above the operating system, but those are  
declining.  (Both because it's no longer practical, and because an  
administrator confined to the operating system is easily outsourced.)

Regards,
-Michael Nygard


On May 2, 2008, at 9:32 AM, Hassan Schroeder wrote:

> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Gordon J Milne <[email protected]>  
> wrote:
>
>> Modern configuration files (usually based on XML) are a nightmare to
>> edit successfully ...
>
>> ... This leads to a lot of head scratching by a sysadmin.
>
> I find all this very puzzling. The large(ish) organizations I've  
> consulted
> with built WAR files targeted to dev,staging,production with  
> appropriate
> values pulled from a single build.conf file. No sysadmin was involved
> in either configuring or deploying those.
>
> Is that actually unusual? It seems pretty logical and straightforward
> to me, at least.
>
> -- 
> Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ [email protected]
>



Michael T. Nygard
[email protected]
http://www.michaelnygard.com/

Author of "Release It!"
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mnee/index.html