Phase 7 — Maintenance

Overview

The Maintenance phase begins immediately after deployment and continues for the lifetime of the system. It encompasses monitoring, incident response, performance optimisation, security patching, and iterative enhancements.

In a modern continuous delivery model, maintenance and development phases overlap — teams continuously ship improvements while the current version is in production.

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Goals

• Maintain system health, availability, and performance
• Respond to and resolve incidents quickly
• Apply security and dependency patches proactively
• Gather feedback for the next development iteration

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Maintenance Activities

1. Monitoring and Alerting

Continuously observe key system signals:

# Prometheus alerting rules example
groups:
  - name: sdlc-service-alerts
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: rate(http_server_requests_seconds_count{status=~"5.."}[5m]) > 0.01
        for: 2m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "High HTTP error rate on {{ $labels.service }}"

      - alert: HighLatency
        expr: histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(http_server_requests_seconds_bucket[5m])) > 0.5
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "p99 latency > 500ms on {{ $labels.service }}"

2. Incident Management

Severity	Response Time	Escalation
P1 — Critical	15 minutes	Immediate — all hands
P2 — High	1 hour	On-call engineer + Tech Lead
P3 — Medium	Next business day	Regular sprint planning
P4 — Low	Next sprint	Backlog

Incident lifecycle:

1. Alert fires → On-call engineer notified
2. Acknowledge and assess severity
3. Create incident channel (Slack/PagerDuty)
4. Mitigate (roll backward if necessary)
5. Resolve root cause
6. Post-incident review (PIR) within 48 hours
7. Action items tracked in Jira

3. Post-Incident Review (PIR)

PIR is blameless and focuses on systemic improvements:

## PIR: Payment service timeout — 2024-03-15

**Duration:** 22:14 – 22:47 UTC (33 minutes)
**Impact:** 12% of payment requests timed out

### Timeline
- 22:14 Alert: p99 latency > 2s on payment-service
- 22:18 On-call acknowledged, began investigation
- 22:31 Root cause identified: DB connection pool exhausted
- 22:47 Fix deployed (connection pool size increased)

### Root Cause
HikariCP max-pool-size was set to 10 for a service handling 
500 RPS. A spike in slow queries exhausted available connections.

### Action Items
- [ ] Increase pool size to 50 and add connection pool monitoring
- [ ] Add database slow query alert (> 100ms threshold)
- [ ] Add load test to CI for this service

4. Dependency Management

Proactively manage library and platform versions:

# Maven dependency check
mvn versions:display-dependency-updates

# OWASP security scan
mvn dependency-check:check

# Renovate / Dependabot — automated PR creation for updates

5. Technical Debt Management

Track and schedule reduction of technical debt:

• Dedicate 10–20% of each sprint to tech debt
• Tag Jira items with tech-debt label
• Refactor incrementally — avoid big-bang rewrites
• Use SonarQube tech debt dashboard for visibility

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Operational Runbooks

Maintain runbooks for common operational tasks:

• How to restart a service safely (drain, restart, verify)
• How to run a database migration in production
• How to increase JVM heap size without restart (JVM flags)
• How to flush a Redis cache
• How to replay Kafka messages from a topic offset

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Exit Criteria

Maintenance is ongoing — it formally "ends" when the system is decommissioned:

• System reaches end-of-life
• Data migration completed
• Service deregistered from service registry and DNS
• Infrastructure destroyed (cloud resources terminated)
• Documentation archived

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Tip: Actuator Endpoints for Maintenance

Enable Spring Boot Actuator for runtime visibility:

• /actuator/health — liveness and readiness
• /actuator/metrics — all Micrometer metrics
• /actuator/loggers — change log level at runtime without restart
• /actuator/env — inspect active configuration
• /actuator/threaddump — diagnose thread starvation