How To Deploy and Operate Terracotta

The process of deploying a Terracotta installation is a combination of preparing your deployment environment and software push process, setting up application monitoring, and devising operating procedures to ensure maximum up-time. The following process guides will help you establish those processes and procedures for your clustered application.

Preparing to Deploy

Well before your first Terracotta deployment, you should go through a few planning steps. The first step is to plan your network architecture and systems provisioning. You will also want to determine how your network operations center will monitor your application with Terracotta enabled. Much of this planning will be done in concert with your performance and destructive testing processes.

Systems and Network Provisioning

Provisioning your production environment for your Terracotta-enabled application is a matter of characterizing the capacity you will require and determining how many application servers you will need to meet that capacity. In addition you will need to size the CPU, memory, and I/O throughput requirements for both the application server machines and the Terracotta server machine. Finally, you will need to determine your availability requirements and provision system and network redundancy appropriately. The Deployment Guide provides guidelines for sizing your production environment .

Monitoring Planning and Integration

Terracotta provides a large amount of telemetry data that you can use to monitor the health of your production application. For maximum uptime, you should devise a monitoring plan appropriate for your application. This process includes determining what to monitor, how to integrate such monitoring into your existing monitoring system, and establishing baselines for healthy operations.

Operate

Operating a production application requires vigilant monitoring and a well-defined runbook for your operations team to follow for routine periodic tasks as well as in response to unexpected events that can affect the health of your cluster. The Operations Guide will help you to develop those procedures and establish best practices for the successful operation of your cluster.