How to submit a Managed Fusion promotion request for a Production environment

Issue:

How do I submit a Managed Fusion promotion request from Staging to Production?

Environment:

Managed Fusion Production environments, post go-live.

Resolution:

Pre-Promotion Steps:

• Implement and test changes in your Development environment
• Promote the tested changes to your Staging environment
• Confirm the tested changes in your Staging environment are stable and complete

Ticket Submission Steps:

Note: Promotion requests are typically fulfilled within 3 business days, assuming all of the required information (see below) has been included in the ticket description.

Note: Everything in Staging will be promoted to Production at the time of request unless specifically indicated as a partial promotion in the ticket description.

• Once the pre-promotion steps have been completed, visit the Lucidworks Support Portal and select Submit a request:
• Select the Managed Services Promotion Request form from the list, and fill out the subject and description fields per the template below:
  
  • Ticket Template:

    • Ticket Subject: Promotion Request - [High level summary]

      • Example: Promotion Request - Add new datasource

• • • Ticket Description:

      • Description:

        1. Nature of the change completed in lower environments:
        2. If multiple apps, which app(s) does the change apply to?:
        3. What part of the system is impacted?: (i.e. specific datasources/index vs query pipeline, files, rules, or profiles)
      • Testing: 
        1. Has this been tested in all lower environments?
        2. How was the new feature tested and validated? (e.g. set of queries this change was tested with, or set of fields that populated as expected)
        3. Is the Staging/Pre-prod environment in sync with Production for the area of the system being changed?
      • Validation:
        1. Is this a partial promotion? (e.g. making a change just to a stage rather than entire pipeline)
        2. How should the Managed Services Team validate the change after promotion? (e.g. set of queries this change was tested with, or set of fields that populated as expected)
      • Performance:
        1. Does this change impact performance? Was any load testing done? (e.g. substantial increase in the index with adding a new collection or introducing wildcards)

 Promotion Steps:

• Lucidworks Managed Services Team promotes outlined changes from Staging to Production.
  
  • The standard SLA for promotion requests is 3 business days. Platinum Support clients may have a different SLA and can check in with their Customer Success Manager regarding this SLA.
• Managed Services Team notifies client that changes are live in Production.
• Client confirms and Managed Services Team closes ticket.

Special Considerations:

• A request to clear collection without an outage may require scheduling the delete for off-hours  or weekends depending on how long it would take to repopulate the collection.
• If there is a special request to do a promotion request during “off-hours”, please specify what the window of time is considered to be “off-hours”.
• If the environments (Staging and Production) are out of sync, Managed Services will typically need confirmation for the promotion. This promotion may be delayed so that Managed Services can verify that the proper components are being promoted.
• If the request is a large promotion with multiple changes to multiple pipelines, datasources, and collections, or part of a new feature implementation, the Managed Services team will reach out and alert that the promotion may be delayed because it may require more time to review the changes before merging.
• If Managed services identifies code that may cause risk to the environment, we may choose to delay the promotion to discuss such risk.
• If Managed Services finds components that are not identified in the promotion request, Managed Services will need confirmation for how to proceed with the promotion. The promotion may be delayed in order to work through the concerns.
• Certain requests may not fit into the criteria for promotions and may require a formal handoff to Support and Managed Services:
  • Full App promotions - These may impact performance of the current environment and need to be reviewed by Cloud Operations.
  • Promotion of multiple collections and/or pipelines - Better described as a partial app promotion.
  • Large code promotions - Possibly part of a Phase 2 implementation or include multiple pipelines that considerably alter the current functionality.
• On rare occasions, the promotion may cause issues in the environment that will need troubleshooting and time to resolve.