Chapter 3. Design Considerations

The most important step in any IT development project is the design. This must be the first step as changes to the design at a later stage will cost time and money. Get the design right and your system will continue to perform well as the user base increases.

At a high level, the design must include the following generic requirements:

• Hardware

• Software

• Network

• Storage

• Performance

All the above must be factored into the overall system architecture. So let's take a look at some of the options and the key design issues.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following areas to help answer some of the questions that influence the decision making process.

• Methods for replicating data: What do we want to achieve?

• Networking: How do we make our solution resilient to network outages?

• Performance and scalability: Will our solution support future non functional requirements?

• Backup and recovery: Can we restore service quickly with no data loss?

• Hardware: What is the size of our budget...