Deprecations or End of Life – Application Management – SOA-C02 Study Guide

Deprecations or End of Life

Most products will eventually reach a point when they no longer serve a useful purpose or no longer align with the organization’s business needs. Typically, an organization takes one of two approaches:

Specify an end of life for the product: This involves indicating when the product will no longer be supported and should no longer be used. It is also referred to as “sunsetting” a product.

Deprecate the product: This occurs when an organization indicates that the product should no longer be used and is unlikely to be supported in the future. Typically, a deprecated product is being replaced by a newer product, but the organization isn’t prepared to force customers to move to the new product. Consider deprecated to be “it is still available, but the developer doesn’t recommend you use it anymore.”

AWS OpsWorks

AWS provides several tools to help you manage deployments. For the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam, you should focus on AWS OpsWorks, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS CloudFormation because these are the tools specifically mentioned on the exam objectives. Recall that AWS Systems Manager and AWS CloudFormation were covered in Chapter 7, “Provisioning Resources.”

AWS OpsWorks consists of three separate products:

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise: Puppet is a third-party product that is used to manage infrastructure resources. It provides a centralized server that performs automated operations on systems, including provisioning, modification, and deprovisioning. Puppet Enterprise also maintains a database of the systems that have been provisioned.

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate: Like Puppet, Chef is a third-party product that allows the central management of infrastructure resources.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks: Prior to supporting Puppet Enterprise and Chef Automate solutions, AWS OpsWorks Stacks was the only OpsWorks option. OpsWorks Stacks leverages the Chef recipes (the text files that define the infrastructure) but does not require provisioning a Chef server.

Complete coverage of Puppet Enterprise, Chef Automate, and OpsWorks Stacks is beyond the scope of this book. The following are some of the key concepts that you want to know for the exam:

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet requires a Puppet server be installed within AWS. Likewise for Chef Automate. In both cases, a wizard is provided to assist with the installation process.

AWS OpsWorks is designed to manage the state of a server, including configuration of the server and installation/removal of software on the server.

Cram Quiz

Answer these questions. The answers follow the last question. If you cannot answer these questions correctly, consider reading this section again until you can.

1. You have been asked to deploy some new features in a build for beta testers to review. Which of the following would be the best build environment to utilize for this scenario?

A. Stable.

B. LTS.

C. Canary.

D. Blue/green.

E. None of these answers are correct.

2. Your organization has decided that one of its products should no longer be used and is unlikely to be supported in the future. Which action should the organization take?

A. Deprecate the product.

B. Rename the product.

C. Ignore the product.

D. Re-release the product.

Cram Quiz Answers

1. Answer: C is correct. In a canary release, new features are released to a specific set of beta testers to determine whether the new features have any negative impact on the software.

2. Answer: A is correct. Deprecate the product. In this situation, an organization indicates that the product should no longer be used and is unlikely to be supported in the future.