MSCOM WebCast Week…Q & A (Part 3) Change and Release Management Strategies with Microsoft.com Operations
Part 3 of the MSCOM’s WebCast Week dealt with Change and Release Management Strategies with Microsoft.com Operations. Wayne King went into an Introduction of MSCOM that included the enterprise scale and high availability architecture that MSCOM OPS is responsible for; the Operational Vision described our vision statement which is to…”Continually broaden our impact as an operational showcase for Microsoft products and engineering best practices”… and how we accomplish that vision. He gave an Organizational Overview to provide a framework for understanding the importance of our teams and the partnerships that are critical to our success which lead into a discussion of Change Activity, what gets changed and what drives those changes, everything form customer content to security patches to enterprise wide platform changes. After describing how and when Operations gets involved with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Wayne then got into the meat of the webcast with Change and Release Management From An Operational Perspective. Everything from the Design and Planning a release to the Release Criteria and required Monitoring to the nuts and bolts of the actual Release Plan itself; which led to the Release Approach that we use. Keeping with the” Rubber meets the Road” mentality we have, he then went into an actual Case Study of how MSCOM gets the bits to where they need to go.
Wednesday’s topic was: Change and Release Management Strategies with Microsoft.com Operations
The replay link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032283695&Culture=en-US
Here are the questions that you asked:
Is MSCOMHELP is under this team ?
MSCOMHLP is in the Operations Team but not specifically under the Engineering portion of that team.
Are all of servers updated to the 64bit?
www.microsoft.com production servers are running x64, the Download Manager porttion of Windows Update site is currently being updated to x64, we are in the process of beginning to roll x64 out to the rest of the sites that we support. Good x64 info was recently posted on our blog site http://blogs.technet.com/mscom.
Do all release types go through this release process/checklist?
Yes, all major, minor, service pack or hotfix releases follow the release process/checklist. Content releases do not come through release management, rather the site managers are able to publish content releases to production outside of the release process.
Do you use automated scripts to move the bits to the specific folder in all servers ?
Sometimes...it depends on the nature of the release, and what and where the bits need to go and what the potential effect they might have on the server. We certainly use them if it makes sense to do so.
How many production releases do you have per week on average?
5 to 10 application/Service releases per week get deployed to the MSCOM Ops production environment. There are various Product Development teams and therefore multiple release teams engaging with the MSCOMOPs team.
How do you manage DB schema changes without any down time ?
A lot of time you can't. We usually have a log shipping secondary that we can use to initially push the schema change to. You must look at your business requirements, if the goal is no data loss...then minimal down time may be acceptable.
Do you prevent Debug DLLS from production systems? If so, how?
Yes, this is managed via our "golden drop" policy and release process. We deploy debug bits to the pre-production environments, and deploy release bits to staging and production. When we use MSI install packages for deployment, we create a debug version as well as a release version. The release managers are then responsible for writing release plans that reference the correct version for deployment into the given environment.
Can you please explain more on the approach to DB schema changes without any downtime and data loss?
We also try to enforce that any new code changes are backwards compatible, that way the DB can remain online. Again you have to look at the business needs and re4quirements.
Hi, does MS.com use ISA Server 2004?
We do not. We are a site that has so much traffic and so any attack attempts that we use other solutions. For www.microsoft.com we use Cisco Guards do to packet filtering at the edge. We also use acls on the routers and we only allow ports 80 and 443 to have access.
