Application Lifecycle

Longevity
Application lifecycle management is a crucial element for distributed application environments, as having to redesign, re-develop, re-test and re-deploy enterprise portals to merge an acquisition, for example, can be a very expensive proposition if previous designs did not account for acquisitions. The ramifications can be far reaching, especially for security and rights.

Phases
Some of the basic application lifecycle phases include:

• BIRTH: Vision, design, development, test
• TRAINING: Interfaces, localization, configuration, deployment
• WORK: Operations, management
• HEALING: Maintenance, updates, migrations
• TRANSPLANT: Upgrades, new components
• DEATH: Replacement, retirement

Iteration
The lifecycle for distributed environments cover and support the lifecycle of every hosted application. Although logically mostly sequencial, these steps and phases can be iterated.

Crucial phases
Every step of every phase is crucial to project success : Bad design, wrong vision, content and security configuration problems, failed upgrades, migrations, and deployments are all well known to foster ballistic projects. An an example, a major airline company spent about 80M USD only deployment of an already existing application from a multinational airline system supplier, but had to roll-back the deployment after months of work because the supplier could not succeed the deployment and disrupted other operations.

Security configuration
Distributed environments can support all steps and phases to provide optimal lifecycle and maximal longevity for themself and for their applications. While many tools are available for many of the steps, some like run-time entitlement security configuration still present major challenges as often, applications, and their business logic, are dependent on specific security configurations. Changing or merging the security configurations can too often imply the re-development of dependent applications.

See also
For more information, on DNAOS lifecycle support and related technologies and issues, please visit other pages in this section and on this site, or send us a note.