Lucene index - production deployment and maintenance

Hi All,

We create Lucene index definition under /oak:index, if we want to index only specific paths we can create this under specific paths also. We create these nodes through CRXDE. But in a production environment we need a better way to plan deployment of indexes and maintenance of them. In Production, we would have multiple publish instances, indexes should be present on all instances.

I could think of "Create a separate package for index definitions, which can be deployed through Continuous Integration tools like Jenkins." 

Are there any best practices for handling this in better way? Would index definitions through code trigger re indexing or create any other issues?

Thanks
Sandeep