Infrastructure and application architecture must go hand in hand for your company to scale technologies while maintaining high performance.
Do you know how important infrastructure architecture is to your business? It is about this theme that will be addressed in today’s post by Marcelo Veriato Lima, our Data Center Engineer.
According to the engineer, no matter if your business is small, medium or large, you need to be aware of the consequences you might face if you set aside your infrastructure architecture.
Following, Marcelo Veriato Lima shares his experiences on infrastructure architecture. Stay tuned and see how to practice the points presented to improve the technologies of your company. Check it out!
But what is the theme of ‘Infrastructure Architecture’ at all, and how important is it?
We face daily computational environments, especially in data centers where new applications are being inserted as the business demands. As companies grow, the need for specific applications increases to support business, administrative, and operational decisions.
In order to raise a new application or service is enough that there is connectivity between source and destination, because for users it does not matter where or how the application is hosted within the infrastructure. Here is the first big mistake.
The second very common mistake is the ability lack to scale the simultaneous accesses number either by application or even infrastructure limitation, imagine that your Intranet receives around 100 simultaneous accesses today. Until then everything is normal, but an internal campaign or a new area for employees is enough for the accesses number to reach 500. First, it is up to the infrastructure to have the ability to supply the new demand in a transparent way to users while maintaining the expected speed.
And the third mistake is lack of resilience. Let’s say that the server hosting the application, be it physical or virtual, is unavailable for any reason, consequently making it impossible for users to access it. Have you ever wondered how much it costs a company a sector or a standing area until the service is restored?
This number can reach a huge sphere, which is why the infrastructure architecture must be very well planned so that errors like these are eliminated from the environment.
Ensuring that infrastructure architecture and application architecture walk together will make computing environments scale at an access peak, being fault tolerant at any of its layers, being it physical, logical, network asset or security, even from the application itself.
Infrastructure architecture models
There is no standard, a primer, or ABCs to build an architecture that adheres to business needs. As the saying goes, “every case is a case.” It is up to the architects and specialists to analyze the company’s technology area to reach the necessary prerequisites for project delivery, prioritizing simplicity and an open architecture.
A first architecture type is one consisting of uniform layers for all applications hosted in the environment. If the company has a standardization and/or reference architecture for its systems, this format is very adherent.
Simply put, think with me, a Web layer, the second Application layer, a third Services layer, and finally the Database, not simple? It is up to the infrastructure architecture to ensure scalability and fault tolerance at each of these layers.
Another format, very old by the way that ended in disuse between 2000 and mid-2008 is the so-called Silo. This architecture was focused on applications where each was hosted in its own corner, regardless of the infrastructure below.
With the Cloud era, the so-called Silo has been enhanced for the micro-segmentation concept, meaning the application is still in its own corner, but now segmented at the infrastructure level, adding scalability, fault tolerance as well as a level Extra safety, isolation and troubleshooting ease.
I hope you understand the importance of an architecture that adheres to business needs in a simplified, scalable and fault tolerant way.
Stay tuned for the continuation of this article and the Nap IT blog, count on our team to answer any other Infrastructure Architecture questions.
Marcelo Veriato Lime is Data Center Engineer at Nap IT.
