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 nonfunctional requirements) and accepted by the business, all your templates for automated production infrastructure provisioning and deployment scripts tested and ready to go, and backup policies and disaster recovery strategies documented and tested.

For the first few deployments, it is 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. However, it is imperative to fully automate the deployments and the associated...