In this section, we will cover the final steps required for a new application to go live on the cloud. By this time, your application should have been fully tested (against functional and non-functional requirements) and accepted by the business. All your templates for automated production infrastructure provisioning and deployment scripts should be tested and ready to go, and backup policies and disaster recovery strategies documented and tested.

It is very useful to create a comprehensive checklist for executing the actual go-live process. This will ensure that you are systematically executing each step in the process, verifying intermediate results (for example, complete and correct data migration), communicating to the stakeholders at regular intervals, making go/no-go decisions at the appropriate times, having a rollback strategy clearly defined, and so on.

As a good practice, after you have deployed your application in the production environment, run a set of predefined tests to ensure your application is functioning as required. You should also test that application monitoring and logging is functioning as expected. Finally, ensure that you engage internal and/or external specialists to conduct a penetration test. These tests could result in changes to the application as well as some infrastructure settings, therefore plan sufficient time in your schedule for a couple iterations of the penetration test. After you have cleared the penetration test, you should be officially live and actively serving your customers.  

At this time, you may also want to schedule a team meeting to analyze what worked well versus what could have been done better during the project. It is also useful to document lessons learnt and best practices for your specific situation, and plan your next release of the application with new features, bug fixes, and tweaks to your infrastructure.

In the next section, we will walk you through the deployment-related activities for our sample application.