App Factory retirement and graduation

App Factory is the perfect place for applications to get started quickly while also taking advantage of the collaboration, support, reuse, and DevOps capabilities that the larger Pega development community provides. However, there may come a time in an application’s life cycle when running an application within a centralized App Factory becomes unfeasible or undesired.

When this time comes, App Factory enables application retirement and graduation.

Application retirement refers to the discontinuing of application service within App Factory. Users' access to the application is eliminated, and application components are subsequently exported off the system. 

Graduating applications go through the retirement process, but the application components are then promoted from App Factory to a new production system — often for scale or compliance.

Application retirement or graduation may occur for a variety of reasons, such as:

• A new application or solution subsumes the application use case  (retirement)
• The application use case is no longer a valid business case.  (retirement)
• The application is not adopted or is no longer used.  (retirement)
• The application requires a production environment with elevated security due to data implications or compliance. (graduation)
• The application requires a production environment with elevated scalability, performance, or resiliency due to usage volume or business criticality. (graduation)

The final stage of the App Factory Application case life cycle facilitates and tracks these application retirements when the time comes.

App Factory governors can kick off retirement by progressing an Application case from Live to Retired. This action initiates a preconfigured flow to facilitate retirement to:

• Notify the application owner of the retirement process
• Request the approval / denial of the process by the application owner
• If approved and graduating, capture the new system location of the graduating application
• Automatically remove all user access to the application

This process is configurable in App Studio to fit your organization’s standards or preferences (for example, to capture more information, automate notifications, or automate the moving of application components into a repository).