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In today's Domino environments, the number and the complexity of Domino applications are increasing due to growing demands and due to the rapid and easy-to-use application development technologies provided by the Domino Designer that facilitate more developers to build applications and to deploy them to an existing infrastructure. In an IBM Domino environment with a large number of applications, one of the main question is how to support this environment so that all involved parties can work efficiently. In this section, through explaining an application hosting framework, we guide developers, administrators, and database owners for improving services so that an environment can scale from a small to a very large deployment while increasing functionality, the level of automation, and customer satisfaction. We also provide the Domino clients guidance to avoid problems before they occur.
Our discussion about Domino application development life-cycle in the previous sections covers the following items
- Quality control for applications that are being developed or being extended.
- Standards or design guidelines for Domino applications.
- Interaction and communication between application owner, application developer, and administrators of the environment.
For production environments, including Domino environments, issues might be raised include:
- Resources required by existing applications are growing over time due to more users or more data within them.
- Operational costs of an application are not identifiable
- Application life-cycle is not supported, not controlled or verified, and not automated.
Due to these issues, a number of effects might be the result for the operation of an environment, which for example, has an impact on user satisfaction or the total cost of ownership of the environment:
- Unable to plan infrastructure resources such as CPU, storage, and memory consumption up front.
- Wasting resources on inefficient applications while others would need them.
- A large variety of custom developed applications due to missing implementation or release processes.
- Critical applications did not get the resources needed.
- Troubleshooting and ad hoc actions become more and more a priority for operators to face low performing applications.
- Simple and efficient applications have to share the costs with the heavy and complex applications that did not use best practices at design time.
Based on the as-is situation described above, the goal of this framework is to significantly improve user efficiency with the following items:
- Improving serviceability by clearly separating interfaces, processes, and services
- Having clear guidelines for all participating parties within the life cycle of an application by using properly defined standards for server infrastructure and applications
- Avoiding application issues (which is equivalent to improve reliability) by proactively planning resources and by continuously reviewing existing applications
- More transparent billing process by classification of applications into categories
While the technical aspects of operating Domino servers has been covered already in the IBM Redbooks wiki
Optimizing Domino Administration, this document focus on the application management process in a production Domino environment:
Parent topic:
2.0 Application development lifecycle