Plan the deployment architecture

Training provides common understanding, vocabulary, and basic skills for those working together on the project. Depending on previous experience with access management and with AM, both internal teams and project partners might need training.

ForgeRock University regularly offers training courses for AM topics, including AM development and deployment. For a current list of available courses, see https://www.forgerock.com/university.

When you have determined who needs training and the timing of the training during the project, prepare a training schedule based on team member and course availability. Include the scheduled training plans in your deployment project plan.

ForgeRock also offers an accreditation program for partners, offering an in-depth assessment of business and technical skills for each ForgeRock product. This program is open to the partner community and ensures that best practices are followed during the design and deployment phases.

When you customize AM, you can improve how the software fits your organization. AM customizations can also add complexity to your system as you increase your test load and potentially change components that could affect future upgrades. Therefore, a best practice is to deploy AM with a minimum of customizations.

Most deployments require at least some customization, like skinning end user interfaces for your organization, rather than using the AM defaults. If your deployment is expected to include additional client applications, or custom extensions (authentication modules, policy conditions, and so forth), then have a team member involved in the development help you plan the work. REST API can be useful when scoping a development project.

Although some customizations involve little development work, it can require additional scheduling and coordination with others in your organization. An example is adding support for profile attributes in the identity repository.

The more you customize, the more important it is to test your deployment thoroughly before going into production. Consider each customization as sub-project with its own acceptance criteria, and consider plans for unit testing, automation, and continuous integration. See Planning Tests for details.

When you have prepared plans for each customization sub-project, you must account for those plans in your overall deployment project plan. Functional customizations, such as custom authentication modules or policy conditions might need to reach the pilot stage before you can finish an overall pilot implementation.

Unless you are planning a maintenance upgrade, consider starting with a pilot implementation, which is a long term project that is aligned with customer-specific requirements.

A pilot shows that you can achieve your goals with AM plus whatever customizations and companion software you expect to use. The idea is to demonstrate feasibility by focusing on solving key use cases with minimal expense, but without ignoring real-world constraints. The aim is to fail fast before you have too much invested so that you can resolve any issues that threaten the deployment.

Do not expect the pilot to become the first version of your deployment. Instead, build the pilot as something you can afford to change easily, and to throw away and start over if necessary.

The cost of a pilot should remain low compared to overall project cost. Unless your concern is primarily the scalability of your deployment, you run the pilot on a much smaller scale than the full deployment. Scale back on anything not necessary to validating a key use case.

Smaller scale does not necessarily mean a single-server deployment, though. If you expect your deployment to be highly available, for example, one of your key use cases should be continued smooth operation when part of your deployment becomes unavailable.

The pilot is a chance to try and test features and services before finalizing your plans for deployment. The pilot should come early in your deployment plan, leaving appropriate time to adapt your plans based on the pilot results. Before you can schedule the pilot, team members might need training and you might require prototype versions of functional customizations.

Plan the pilot around the key use cases that you must validate. Make sure to plan the pilot review with stakeholders. You might need to iteratively review pilot results as some stakeholders refine their key use cases based on observations.

When you first configure AM, there are many options to evaluate, plus a number of ways to further increase levels of security. You must, therefore, plan to secure the deployment as described in Security.

AM delegates authentication and profile storage to other services. AM can store configuration, policies, session, and other tokens in an external directory service. AM can also participate in a circle of trust with other SAML entities. In each of these cases, a successful deployment depends on coordination with service providers, potentially outside of your organization.

The infrastructure you need to run AM services might be managed outside your own organization. Hardware, operating systems, network, and software installation might be the responsibility of providers with which you must coordinate.

When working with providers, take the following points into consideration:

For each provider you work with, add the necessary coordinated activities to your overall plan, as well as periodic checks to make sure that parallel work is proceeding according to plan.

When planning integration with AM client applications, the applications that are most relevant are those that register with AM; therefore, you should make note of the following types of client applications registering with AM:

For each client application whose integration with AM requires coordination, add the relevant tasks to your overall plan.

AM and the web or Java agents can log audit information to different formats, such as flat files and relational databases. Log volumes depend on usage and on logging levels. By default, AM generates both access and error messages for each service, providing the raw material for auditing the deployment. For more information about supported audit log formats and the information logged, see Audit logging and Reference.

In order to analyze the raw material, however, you must use other software, such as Splunk, which indexes machine-generated data for analysis.

If you require integration with an audit tool, plan the tasks of setting up logging to work with the tool, and analyzing and monitoring the data once it has been indexed. Consider how you must retain and rotate log data once it has been consumed, as a high volume service can produce large volumes of log data.

Include these plans in the overall plan.

In addition to planning tests for each customized component, test the functionality of each service you deploy, such as authentication, policy decisions, and federation. You should also perform non-functional testing to validate that the services hold up under load in realistic conditions. Perform penetration testing to check for security issues. Include acceptance tests for the actual deployment. The data from the acceptance tests help you to make an informed decision about whether to go ahead with the deployment or to roll back.

The AM product documentation is written for readers like you, who are architects and solution developers, as well as for AM developers and for administrators who have had AM training. The people operating your production environment need concrete documentation specific to your deployed solution, with an emphasis on operational policies and procedures.

Procedural documentation can take the form of a runbook with procedures that emphasize maintenance operations, such as backup, restore, monitoring and log maintenance, collecting data pertaining to an issue in production, replacing a broken server or web or Java agent, responding to a monitoring alert, and so forth. Make sure in particular that you document procedures for taking remedial action in the event of a production issue.

Furthermore, to ensure that everyone understands your deployment and to speed problem resolution in the event of an issue, changes in production must be documented and tracked as a matter of course. When you make changes, always prepare to roll back to the previous state if the change does not perform as expected.

Include documentation tasks in your overall plan. Also, include the tasks necessary to put in place and to maintain change control for updates to the configuration.

If you own the architecture and planning, but others own the service in production, or even in the labs, then you must plan coordination with those who own the service.

Start by considering the service owners' acceptance criteria. If they have defined support readiness acceptance criteria, you can start with their acceptance criteria. You can also ask yourself the following questions:

Also, plan back line support with ForgeRock or a qualified partner. The aim is to define clearly who handles production issues, and how production issues are escalated to a product specialist if necessary.

Include a task in the overall plan to define the hand off to production, making sure there is clarity on who handles monitoring and issues.

In addition to planning for the hand off of the production system, also prepare plans to roll out the system into production. Rollout into production calls for a well-choreographed operation, so these are likely the most detailed plans.

Take at least the following items into account when planning the rollout:

In your overall plan, leave time and resources to finalize rollout plans toward the end of the project.

Before rolling out into production, plan how to monitor the system to know when you must grow, and plan the actions to take when you must add capacity.

Unless your deployment is very constrained, after your successful rollout of access management services, you can expect to add capacity at some point in the future. Therefore, you should plan to monitor system growth.

You can grow many parts of the system by adding servers or adding clients. The parts of the system that you cannot expand so simply are those parts that depend on writing to the directory service.

The directory service eventually replicates each write to all other servers. Therefore, adding servers simply adds the number of writes to perform. One simple way of getting around this limitation is to split a monolithic directory service into several directory services. That said, directory services often are not a bottleneck for growth.

When should you expand the deployed system? The time to expand the deployed system is when growth in usage causes the system to approach performance threshold levels that cause the service to underperform. For that reason, devise thresholds that can be monitored in production, and plan to monitor the deployment with respect to the thresholds. In addition to programming appropriate alerts to react to thresholds, also plan periodic reviews of system performance to uncover anything missing from regular monitoring results.

In this section, "upgrade" means moving to a more recent release, whether it is a patch, maintenance release, minor release, or major release. For definitions of the types of release, refer to ForgeRock product release levels.

Upgrades generally bring fixes, or new features, or both. For each upgrade, you must build a new plan. Depending on the scope of the upgrade, that plan might include almost all of the original overall plan, or it might be abbreviated, for example, for a patch that fixes a single issue. In any case, adapt deployment plans, as each upgrade is a new deployment.

When planning an upgrade, pay particular attention to testing and to any changes necessary in your customizations. For testing, consider compatibility issues when not all agents and services are upgraded simultaneously. Choreography is particularly important, as upgrades are likely to happen in constrained low usage windows, and as users already have expectations about how the service should behave.

When preparing your overall plan, include a regular review task to determine whether to upgrade, not only for patches or regular maintenance releases, but also to consider whether to upgrade to new minor and major releases.

Disaster recovery planning and a robust backup strategy is essential when server hardware fails, network connections go down, a site fails, and so on. Your team must determine the disaster recovery procedures to recover from such events.