Chapter 4: Designing System Deployment Architectures

How we deploy systems determines so much about how those systems will perform and how resilient they will be for years to come. A good understanding of design components and principles is necessary for us to understand in order to approach the design of the platforms that will carry our workloads. Remember, at the end of the day, only the applications running at the very top of the stack matter - everything beneath the applications, whether the operating system, hypervisor, storage, hardware, and others are just tools used to enable the final application-level workloads to do what they need to do best. It is easy to feel that these other components matter individually, but they do not. To put it another way, what matters is the results rather than the path taken to get to the results.

In this chapter, we are going to start by looking at the building blocks of systems (other than storage which we tackled extensively in our last...