Move AuraPlayer Applications to Production Follow
Congratulations. You are now ready to move your modernized back-office system to production. After finishing the development and testing stages, it’s time to move your modern applications and APIs built with AuraPlayer to production.
To move forward, you need to follow the following simple steps. Please note that there are 2 main ways to move your systems to production with AuraPlayer:
- Manually - via the AuraPlayer ServiceManager UI
- Automatically - AuraPlayer ServiceManager has an option to do automation and integration with DevOps to perform all the actions with APIs as part of your Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) processes.
This document guides you through the process of moving to production either manually or with REST APIs to automate the whole process. Thus, you can choose which way is preferable to your company.
Manual Move to Production
The manual process of moving to production can be summarized as follows:
Check that your production environment is properly configured
Before moving the systems to production, we usually recommend to check that:
- AuraPlayer ServiceManager is installed properly in your production environment.
- Your AuraPlayer ServiceManager version in your production environment is the same as in your test environment, in order to avoid inconsistencies.
- Security is configured as per the architecture of your choice. Please refer to the AuraPlayer Deployment and Architectures Guide here
- AuraPlayer ServiceManager is open to your Oracle servers so that it can access all the required Oracle components in an effective way.
- AuraPlayer ServiceManager is available to your users, whether they are internal users or external users.
Disconnect your users and customers
When it comes to moving to production, we always remind customers to plan for a downtime period. Moving to production is a process when no one can work with the AuraPlayer ServiceManager, hence our best practice is to disconnect all the users and customers and make sure that everyone is aware of this stage
Backup your current production environment
It is extremely important to backup your production environment, in case you need to restore your previous production version if you encounter any issues with the new application.
AuraPlayer ServiceManager has many built-in options on how to backup its data:
- Backup of all production applications and services - Do the following steps:
1. Click on the Admin tab in the left side menu.
2. Click on the “Backup” button in the Data Management section.
This is our most recommended option to backup your production environment, since it performs the full backup of ALL AuraPlayer artifacts.
- Backup selected applications only - Do the following steps:
1. Click on the “Applications” button on the left side menu, and select only the applications you’d like to backup.
2. Click on the “backup” button in the Action menu.
This option is good for those users who know which applications they will need and if there’s one or several applications they would like to skip.
Note: when you backup an application, AuraPlayer ServiceManager backs up the application and all the services related to it.
- Backup selected services only - Click Services on the left menu, select the services you’d like to backup. The backup option will be found in the Action menu.
When the backup option is selected, AuraPlayer ServiceManager downloads a zip file to your local machine. Please make sure to keep it safe.
Of course, another option for backup that can be done independently without AuraPlayer ServiceManager, is to simply take a snapshot of the full AuraPlayer production machine.
Create an AuraPlayer artifact of your new development Machine
Similar to the production backup, in order to create AuraPlayer artifact of your new development, there are several options to do that depending on which applications and services you would like to upload to production:
- All applications and services
- Selected applications only
- Selected services only
In order to create AuraPlayer artifact, just go to your ready and tested new environment and backup the artifacts you would like to move to your production environment, as explained earlier.
Again, it will download a zip file to your local machine that includes everything you chose to be uploaded to your production environment.
Deploy the new artifact to your production environment
The upload of the new application and services to the production environment is done via the Restore option:
- Select the Admin tab on the left menu.
- Click on the Restore button in the Data Management section and select the zip file, downloaded to your local machine in the previous backup step.
Note: When you restore from a zip file, the AuraPlayer ServiceManager deploys all applications and services that are included in that zip file.
Configure your production environment
Having deployed the new applications and services into production, now it’s time to do some configurations:
- Change services’ domains
After restoration, your new services will still point to the original test environment where you had created the backed up zip file. Please refer to How to Change a Domain article in order to learn how to change the domains of your services to now point to the production server domains.
- System Properties configurations
Note that sometimes you may encounter certain changes in system properties between test and production environments. For example:
1. When dealing with Oracle EBS, the “config” and the “server module” are not the same. Therefore, they need to be configured separately.
2. AuraPlayer ServiceManager has a daily backup directory, which is obviously different in these two environments.
Please follow this link in order to learn more on how to change the system properties in AuraPlayer ServiceManager.
- Environment Variables
Using environment variables is the recommended way to set different value for each environment. Environment Variables are environment-specific properties, that shall reflect differences between different servers/environments. While System Properties are copied as-is, Environment Variables won’t be copied when migrating from one environment to another. For example, you can have many services that use the same environment variable that represents the domain, Once the domain is changed, all services will inherit this change. Thus, much less changes will be done, when moving between environments. You can set environment variables in the system properties page.
Test the new release
The next step of course would be to test the application and services in the new environment with the recently introduced changes in place. We recommend testing both services and applications properly, to make sure your new code is working as expected.
Backup your new production environment
Great news! Your production environment is now ready. As always, it’s important to backup your environment after every major milestone.
As mentioned earlier, there are two main ways to backup your system:
- Backup, as explained earlier, all AuraPlayer ServiceManager artifacts
- Make a snapshot of the whole machine
Note that the ServiceManager automatically backs up its data to the local disk on a daily basis. You may find this very helpful once you need to restore changes quickly or revert back some actions. In addition, you may decide to backup the new production environment to a safer place, in case there is a problem on the physical server.
Reconnect your users and customers
You are ready to go. Everyone can work with the new production environment. Make sure to pass the good news to your users and customers.
DevOps: Automated Move to Production
AuraPlayer ServiceManager gives you another option to perform backups and restores. There’s no need to do all the above mentioned steps manually. AuraPlayer suggests you to automate these steps and activate them by calling REST APIs. That way you can write your own scripts and build an automated move to production process.
The following REST APIs are available for you as part of the ServiceManager package:
- Full backup of all applications and services - creating a zip file, as described above
- Restore applications and services from a zip file
- Get the list of the URLs the services are calling to
- Change the list of the URLs the services are calling to
- Update system properties
More details about these APIs can be found in the article How to Export / Import from the ServiceManager using an API.
To summarize, moving to production is an easy task with AuraPlayer. Doing it correctly will help you avoid any issues with your applications.
In addition, AuraPlayer consultants would be happy to help you move to your production environment smoothly and successfully according to your own business needs. Feel free to contact us at support@auraplayer.com for further information.
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