Four Deployment Considerations To Ensure Your Critical Applications Are Production-Ready

The transition from development to production of a solution or application is often filled with many learning opportunities. Location, physical environment, security, and solution complexity are all critical factors in the user experience and ultimately the effectiveness of your solutions, yet the challenges associated with each are often overlooked. In this post, we will outline four considerations an engineer should pause and consider before they are ready to call a solution “Production Ready.”

We will begin by highlighting the obvious elements that demand most of our time and attention, such as data formats, functionality specifications, and user experience/interface. While these are crucial, we often overlook equally important factors like field performance, cybersecurity, lifecycle supportability, and reliability.

Field Performance

One of the amazing things Ignition enables us to do is bring meaning (context and value) to your site’s data. We all know that the limits are endless to what you can build with Ignition, however, the performance of your solution is bound by the compute platform powering it and the networks feeding it.

For the network portion, we have learned great techniques, such as leveraging MQTT to allow us to get more out of our bandwidth, and we have adopted edge platforms to process data near the source to improve our latency from physical to digital and, most importantly, back to physical. After all, using your data to generate valuable insight is only half the battle, but integrating that insight back into action is where you impact your bottom line.

An engineer deploying a solution should test, validate, and measure performance not just in a lab but in the same environment where a solution will be deployed to ensure that the performance will be sufficient to close that value loop. Furthermore, we also know that a good solution needs room for growth because often eliminating one bottleneck or inefficiency is the best way to identify the next one. For this reason, you should choose a platform that will give you the performance you need both today as well as what you will need in a few years. Give your Ignition project the engine it needs to ensure you can continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.

Cybersecurity

Many automation and control systems rely on legacy technologies that were not designed with cybersecurity in mind. These systems often lack built-in security features and are challenging to update or replace, leaving them vulnerable to cyber threats. Implementing cyber-secure solutions in remote, unmanned, or hostile environments typical of many factories, plants, and facilities presents significant challenges. Simply put, security must be improved with every deployment; otherwise your digital solution could be the source that an attacker may target. In this area, engineers should review and consider physical security as well as cybersecurity and understand any possible ways a solution can be targeted.

Zero-trust practices are becoming commonplace in these environments, and we should design our solutions with these requirements in mind to ensure that we are secure by design. A good consideration is to evaluate not only how you can integrate with current security standards but also how you can improve the posture and even host new layers of protection that may be necessary now and in the future.

Lifecycle Supportability

Since project funding is so often a key metric considered in a project being labeled a success or a failure, ROI is a key metric we track. Because of this, we often fall into the trap of only thinking about a solution being supported through the achievement of the ROI, and everything else is just icing on the cake. The truth, however, is that these solutions have the ability and tendency to deliver value for many more years after your ROI is achieved. For this reason, engineers should consider the entire lifecycle of a solution.

A recommendation is to consider the tools and resources required to both deploy, upgrade, patch, and even replace solutions on the front end. This focus could help you not only have a smooth deployment but also set a foundation and standard for future projects. Orchestration tools and system management are key to the success of DevOps and Agile Operations.

Think of not only how you expect your solution to work, but also about how you can implement the changes required to improve your solution. This can be very challenging across enterprises, but tackling this challenge as part of your project design can be a feature that enables you to succeed.

Reliability

Many times when this word comes up, we are thinking about how our solution can solve for the reliability of our field assets, but a common mistake is not considering the reliability of our solution itself. For a solution to be “Production-Ready,” it will first be integrated into the site’s operational procedures, and at that point, we have the responsibility to make it dependable. After all, if our solution really is valuable, our operations will grow to depend on it. For this reason, we must consider not only all the failure modes of our architecture but also what protections are in place for when each of those scenarios takes place.

The only guarantee in operations is that what can happen eventually will, so preparing for failures is the only way to make our solutions truly “Production-Ready.” At Stratus, this is our model, and we provide Fault-Tolerant edge platforms designed to be up to 99.99999% available.

The label of “Production Ready” should not be taken lightly because this is often where an innovative solution needs to graduate from a “fail fast and cheap” mindset to a “mission critical” mindset. With Ignition and Stratus, we can keep innovation in the software and development space and ensure the quality and reliability of production solutions that impact the bottom line.