The planning and design of your new or evolving IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) environment requires understanding of your existing and future business and technical needs. There likely are other applications which will need to be integrated with ELM to provide practitioners workflows and data flows needed for their productivity and corporate / regulatory standards which must be met. This document will focus on how you can build a technical deployment that meets your needs, while being flexible enough to grow as your needs change.

Gathering the basics

To begin with you should have detailed and documented understanding of your current technical and operational environment. The goal is to understand your organizational standards and capabilities which may influence your deployment of ELM choices:

• Current topology supporting engineering teams and its characteristics
  • Infrastructure technology choices (e.g., OS, DB, identity management, etc.)
  • Hosting (on prem, cloud based, etc.)
• Software tool landscape
• Availability and uptime requirements

Additional considerations and requirements, which could impact topology flexibility include:

• Typical ELM usage scenarios / patterns by job role and location
• Planned usage model, growth projections, and performance requirements
• Security, audit, and compliance requirements which may have impacts to your deployment topology, i.e., separating projects, users, or servers

A more detailed set of questions to consider can be found at typical questions. These questions are not exhaustive; they are designed to provide guidance in gathering the information which may impact your deployment topology.

Key Links:

• Engineering Lifecycle Management Architecture Overview
• ELM Sizing Strategy
• Blog – Getting to a right sized Jazz environment

Define deployment topology

After you have defined your technical choices, usage requirements, and growth projections, reviewing these [[https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/StandardTopologiesOverview][standard topologies] will allow help identify patterns which are appropriate for addressing your needs. A detailed assessment of matching your requirements to these topologies can be provided by IBM or Business Partner services teams. These topologies are designed to be customized to meet your middleware, scale, availability, and other non-functional requirements.

Deployment examples:

• Standard deployment topologies overview
• IBM Jazz.net example
• IBM Hursely DevOps environment

Validating deployment

A key aspect of managing your ELM environment is having an appropriate testing / staging environment, this environment should match your production environment as closely as possible. You can use this environment to:

• Validate your topology choices
• Develop training assets, and train new employees on ELM usage
• Test application configuration changes before enabling in production
• Execute performance stress tests
• Perform test upgrades and migrations

Exercising this environment allows for upskilling your operational team, while giving you baseline expectations for managing your production deployment. Balancing the flexibility of your potential topology with the operational support required to administer the environment is one item to assess when establishing your test environment.

Key links:

• Planning your URIs
• Understanding Reverse Proxy
• Reverse Proxies and Load Balancers in an IBM ELM Deployment
• Planning for multiple Jazz Application Server Instances

Deploy to production and proactively monitor

After you have defined your requirements, established your projections, customized your topology, and validated it in a test environment, it’s time to deploy to production.

The process doesn’t end there, you will need to monitor the environment and adjust it to ensure that your enterprise can achieve the ongoing benefits of utilizing ELM. A detailed article on what you should monitor and how to respond to it can be found at the monitoring article.

Key Links:

• Approaches to implementing high availability and disaster recovery for Jazz
• Jazz Team Server Authentication Explained
• Deployment Monitoring
• Performance sizing guides and datasheets
• ELM Licensing Explained
• Ranges and Limits