The Commercial Software Distribution Lifecycle
Developed by Replicated after a decade of working with ISVs, the Lifecycle focuses on the unique steps to successfully distribute third party, commercial software to tens, hundreds, or thousands of enterprise customers.
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Develop refers to the technical decisions made by software vendors to prepare software to be consumed by enterprise customers in self-hosted environments. To provide a seamless experience for customers, software vendors must consider how an application will be secured and distributed while developing it, not after the fact. This includes considerations during the design, architecture, and packaging of the application. When done well, customers can install a secure version of the application where they want without any major changes to the application’s architecture.
Testing refers to ensuring that enterprise software can be successfully and reliably distributed to current and future customer-managed environments. Ideally, testing happens before the application ever gets into the hands of customers. Different customer environments act differently, and the same application successfully installed in one customer environment could present challenges in the next. For this reason, testing self-hosted software needs to go beyond unit and integration tests and also focus on the environments where the application will be deployed.
Licensing refers to securely granting access to software. Licensing codifies the agreements defined in the software contract between the vendor and the enterprise customer, and makes those agreements available to the underlying application through a license server during startup or runtime.
Releasing refers to the process of delivering software to licensed users, ensuring that new features, improvements, and bug fixes get into the hands of the right customers at the right frequency.
Key considerations for vendors include:
• Making application images available for customers to access securely.
• Packaging and publishing release artifacts in multiple formats to support different installation methods and customer environments.
Installing refers to the steps that enterprise customers need to take to securely deploy software in their environment. For modern on-prem software, the installation process varies depending on the release delivery method and the installation environment (such as online versus air gap installations, or Kubernetes clusters versus VMs or bare metal servers).
Reporting refers to gaining visibility into performance and usage metadata for software instances running in customer-controlled environments. For example, many vendors will collect:
• Metadata about the environment
• Application uptime and service status
• Adoption data such as the current application version
• Usage data such as daily or weekly active users of the application
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Support refers to the services, tools, and documentation offered by a software vendor that help customers troubleshoot and resolve issues with their instance of the vendor’s software. Providing robust support ensures that issues are resolved quickly, reducing interruptions to usage. This improves the customer experience and builds customer confidence in the software.
Want to Learn More?
Written by experts from Replicated who have been working with enterprise software for over a decade, The Software Distribution Handbook is an essential guide on how to distribute on-prem software securely, resiliently, and quickly.
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