Hot deployment of code, configuration, and fixes

While the methodologies and design patterns presented insulate critical areas of the solution from downtime, there are deployment techniques that are provided by IBM® or are inherent within the architecture of Sterling™ Order Management System Software that allow you to hot deploy incremental changes, configuration, and fixes on critical synchronous application components.

Some of these capabilities include the ability to:

• Deploy changes to incremental configuration or master data without having to bring down any application areas.
• Hot deploy incremental software or code changes on the synchronous application components by utilizing capabilities offered by the application server or by utilizing application server independent techniques like clusters and rolling restarts.

Theoretically, there could be scenarios where even a small change to a component may require multiple areas of the application to be updated simultaneously due to inter-dependencies, thus causing an outage. However, in reality, a large number of incremental changes and product fixes can utilize these techniques even without any explicit hot deployment design considerations.

Explicitly factoring in requirements to be able to hot deploy changes during incremental solution design phases leads to the ability to hot deploy all changes with a few exceptions. This situation is further mitigated by the dependence of Sterling Order Management System Software on asynchronous processing for complex algorithms. This significantly reduces the solution footprint that external synchronous interfaces, like those from the website, rely on. This, in turn, reduces the probability of many changes or fixes in these areas.