Enterprise Applications: Checklist For Lowering the Cost of Operations

Lower the TCO of management and administration by choosing applications that meet the criteria on the checklist.

• API
  • all UI operations should reflected in API (including administrative controls)
  • the API should use the same credentials as the UI
  • all the business logic should live in the server
• Extensibility
  • execute arbitrary actions based on events
• Authentication
  • should integrate with LDAP/AD
  • should use user and group ACLS for object management and access
• Revision Control
  • configs should be in files or have built in revision control capability
  • modifications/extensions should be in files or have built in revision control capability
• High Availability
  • should support clustering
  • ideally clustering should support geographic distribution
  • should be able to recover from situation like multiple active nodes
• Disaster Recovery
  • ideally an extension of HA with geographic distribution
• %0 downtime (or as close as possible) for upgrades
• %0 downtime (or as close as possible) for maintenance
• Should be monitorable via standard network protocols (SNMP, HTTP, etc) BTW: email does NOT count
• Should easily scale horizontally
• Operation Cost
  • should have %0 manual administrative management for standard usage (no cleaning queues, removing files, marking messages)

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