Google Search Appliance Deployment Governance and Operational Models - Manual (Page 18)

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Chapter 4 GSA Environment Approach
Overview
It is advantageous to test changes in a separate environment before releasing them to end users. As with
any type of server or application, a small change to a configuration could have unintended consequences,
so a proper testing strategy and staging environment is recommended for changes to any search
application.
The following environments are recommended for successfully developing, testing, staging, and rolling
out the solution to production:
●
Lab/Development environment
●
T esting/QA environment (optional)
●
Production environment
Although ideal, physical environments are not necessary. For example, Lab/Development and Testing/QA
can be built out on the same GSA by using a combination of different front ends and collections.
Lab / Development environment
A development environment for the Google Search Appliance simply means replicating the production
environment to provide a separate area for developing and integrating configuration changes and new
enhancements. The development environment should include access to the same content types and
sources as the production environment, but it might include a restricted or reduced set of documents. All
integration components being deployed, such as the SAML Bridge or connectors, should have matching
development instances.
The development environment does not have to be sized according to production standards. It can be
downsized
accordingly as it doesn’t have to take into account the document size or performance
requirements of a production system.
A common development setup includes a non-production search appliance that does not serve results to
most
end-users. All configuration changes, updates, and enhancements are tested on this search
appliance, and then pushed to the next environment stage when ready.
Where possible, avoid using hard-coded naming conventions that might complicate migrating
configurations. For example, dev_collection or test_frontend would need to be renamed to move to
production.
The Google Search Appliance Admin APIs, introduced in software release 6.0, enable you to export and
import
fine-grained configurations (for example, individual KeyMatches) or coarse-grained configurations
(the entire configuration for a search appliance). For information about the Admin APIs, see the
Administrative API Developer Guides, which are linked to the public GSA documentation page .
The development environment can also be used as a testing environment before the production release
of realized requirements.