Appendix E. Launch Coordination Checklist

This is Google’s original Launch Coordination Checklist, circa 2005, slightly abridged for brevity:

Architecture

• Architecture sketch, types of servers, types of requests from clients

• Programmatic client requests

Machines and datacenters

• Machines and bandwidth, datacenters, N+2 redundancy, network QoS

• New domain names, DNS load balancing

Volume estimates, capacity, and performance

• HTTP traffic and bandwidth estimates, launch “spike,” traffic mix, 6 months out

• Load test, end-to-end test, capacity per datacenter at max latency

• Impact on other services we care most about

• Storage capacity

System reliability and failover

• What happens when:

  • Machine dies, rack fails, or cluster goes offline

  • Network fails between two datacenters

• For each type of server that talks to other servers (its backends):

  • How to detect when backends die, and what to do when they die

  • How to terminate or restart without affecting clients or users

  • Load balancing, rate-limiting, timeout, retry and error handling behavior

• Data backup/restore, disaster recovery

Monitoring and server management

• Monitoring internal state, monitoring end-to-end behavior, managing alerts

• Monitoring the monitoring

• Financially important alerts and logs

• Tips for running servers within cluster environment

• Don’t crash mail servers by sending yourself email alerts in your own server code

Security

• Security design review, security code audit, spam risk, authentication, SSL

• Prelaunch visibility/access control, various types of blacklists

Automation and manual tasks

• Methods and change control to update servers, data, and configs

• Release process, repeatable builds, canaries under live traffic, staged rollouts

Growth issues

• Spare capacity, 10x growth, growth alerts

• Scalability bottlenecks, linear scaling, scaling with hardware, changes needed

• Caching, data sharding/resharding

External dependencies

• Third-party systems, monitoring, networking, traffic volume, launch spikes

• Graceful degradation, how to avoid accidentally overrunning third-party services

• Playing nice with syndicated partners, mail systems, services within Google

Schedule and rollout planning

• Hard deadlines, external events, Mondays or Fridays

• Standard operating procedures for this service, for other services