This section provides a reference for the terms used throughout this document.
Document scope
- Reference configuration: A guide with the basic steps to deploy the layered stack of components from both the SUSE and partner portfolios. This is considered a fundamental basis to demonstrate a specific, tested configuration of components.
- Reference architecture: A reference architecture guide has the general steps to deploy and validate the structured solution components from both the SUSE and partner portfolios. This provides a shareable template of consistency for consumers to leverage for similar production ready solutions, including design considerations, implementation suggestions and best practices.
- Best practice: Information that can overlap both the SUSE and partner space. It can either be provided as a standalone guide that provides reliable technical information not covered in other product documentation, based on real-life installation and implementation experiences from subject matter experts or complementary, embedded sections within any of the above documentation types describing considerations and possible steps forward.
Factors
- Automation: Infrastructure automation enables speed through faster execution when configuring the infrastructure and aims at providing visibility to help other teams across the enterprise work quickly and more efficiently. Automation removes the risk associated with human error, like manual misconfiguration; removing this can decrease downtime and increase reliability. These outcomes and attributes help the enterprise move towards implementing a culture of DevOps, the combined working of development and operations.
- Availability: Availability is the probability that an item operates satisfactorily, without failures or downtimes, under stated conditions as a function of its reliability, redundancy and maintainability attributes. Some major objectives to achieve a wanted service level objectives are:
- Preventing or reducing the likelihood and frequency of failures using design decisions within the allowed cost of ownership
- Correcting or coping with possible component failures using resiliency, automated failover and disaster-recovery processes
- Estimating and analyzing current conditions to prevent unexpected failures using predictive maintenance
- Integrity: Integrity is the maintenance of, and the insurance of the accuracy and consistency of a specific element over its entire life cycle. Both physical and logical aspects must be managed to ensure stability, performance, reusability and maintainability.
- Security: Security is about ensuring freedom from or resilience against potential harm, including protection from destructive or hostile forces. To minimize risks, you must manage governance to avoid tampering, maintain access controls to prevent unauthorized usage and integrate layers of defense, reporting and recovery tactics.
Deployment flavors
- Proof-of-concept: Proof-of-concept is a partial or nearly complete prototype constructed to demonstrate functionality and feasibility for verifying specific aspects or concepts under consideration. This is often a starting point when evaluating a new, transitional technology. Sometimes it starts as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that has enough features to satisfy an initial set of requests. After such insights and feedback are obtained and potentially addressed, redeployments may be used to iteratively branch into other realms or to incorporate other known working functionality.
- Production: A deployed environment that target customers or users can interact with and rely upon to meet their needs, plus be operationally sustainable in terms of resource utilization and economic constraints.
- Scaling: The flexibility of a system environment to either vertically scale-up, horizontally scale-out or conversely scale-down by adding or subtracting resources as needed. Attributes like capacity and performance are often the primary requirements to address, while still maintaining functional consistency and reliability.