Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

5.1. The Big Picture

Mission-critical systems are fundamental to the business, so failures or outages in these systems can be disastrous. The primary goal of enterprise architectures is to have no single points of failure. The system should be tolerant to a single component failure. A component can be an entire server or an internal component of a server, such as a power supply, a fan, or a network card.

The actual size, scale, and characteristics of the production environment are determined largely by the key technical requirements, the applications being deployed, and their usage. The key technical requirements that you should take into account include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Number of users

• Transaction profiles

• Performance

• Availability

• Scalability

• Operability

• Backup and recovery

• Disaster recovery

A typical production hardware environment is a multi-server topology in which the application components are distributed across different physical servers (web servers, application servers, databases servers, and so forth). The production architecture is highly robust and fault tolerant in order to meet all the quality requirements. In many cases, the production environment also has a disaster recovery counterpart, which is usually hosted in a completely separate data center.

One of the most widely used diagrams throughout the project lifecycle is the production architecture (or deployment) diagram. The objective of the diagram is to show in a single picture, a high-to-medium ...