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enterpriseproduction-environment

What is "Enterprise ready"? Can we test for it?

There are a couple of questions on Stackoverflow asking whether x (Ruby / Drupal) technology is 'enterprise ready'.

I would like to ask how is 'enterprise ready' defined.

Has anyone created their own checklist?

Does anyone have a benchmark that they test against?

Solution

  • "Enterprise Ready" for the most part means can we run it reliably and effectively within a large organisation.

    There are several factors involved:

    • Is it reliable?
    • Can our current staff support it, or do we need specialists?
    • Can it fit in with our established security model?
    • Can deployments be done with our automated tools?
    • How easy is it to administer? Can the business users do it or do we need a specialist?
    • If it uses a database, is it our standard DB, or do we need to train up more specialists?

    Depending on how important the system is to the business the following question might also apply:

    • Can it be made highly available?
    • Can it be load balanced?
    • Is it secure enough?

    Open Source projects often do not pay enough attention to the difficulties of deploying and running software within a large organisation. e.g. Most OS projects default to MySql as the database, which is a good and sensible choice for most small projects, however, if your Enterprise has an ORACLE site license and a team of highly skilled ORACLE DBAs in place the MySql option looks distinctly unattractive.