How to successfully go live or launch a new activity with Cloudinary

Audience: Developers, Release managers, and IT managers, planning to go live with a Cloudinary implementation on their app or website.

This article specifies our best practices for any major launch or changes in your Cloudinary implementation. The stages for such a launch or change-over are:

Planning 

Share your plan with our support or your dedicated CSM (Customer Success Manager) if on an Enterprise plan. Sharing your plan would help us better understand your specific needs, and allow us to suggest optimization, upcoming features, new add-ons, or simply share our experience with other customers doing a similar activity. For example, you might plan to utilize our Admin API, and we could point out that this API is rate limited and avoid hitting the limit after go-live.

  Use our documentation to get familiar with product features, integrations, and APIs.

  Check our blog and cookbook for higher-level implementations.

  We also have an extensive training program.

  If you’re still missing a capability, maybe it is on Cloudinary’s roadmap. Feel free to check it out.

Development

  It is recommended to share your new transformations, presets, configuration changes, or any other deliverable for a short review. Share also the intended workflow of assets from upload to delivery, the type of assets, and the number of them. Our experts would be able to assert the top performance and quality of your deliverables.
 Use our SDKs to accelerate your development. Each repository has one or more demo applications in its samples folder.

 If you’ve encountered an issue that requires our help, please let us know that you’re in a development phase, your timeline, and the urgency level.

Deployment and monitoring 

Let us know when the changes to your website are going to be deployed, how many images and videos would be affected, how much traffic is expected, etc. If configuration changes are needed to be done by us, then please let us know when to apply them. We will be able to monitor the activity from our side, and alert if it looks different than you expected. For customers on Enterprise plans, please coordinate with your CSM at least two days in advance of the deployment, to receive optimal support. During deployment, make sure to note your error console and review the pages/apps in the production environment. For Enterprise plans, remain in touch with your CSM and Solutions Architect.

Post-deployment

For the next few days, keep reviewing your reports and error console. It is also recommended to keep monitoring the pages/apps in Production.

The bottom line, having a successful go-live depends on detailed planning, careful execution, and dropping us a note.