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System design and architecture are critical and need to accommodate a variety of technical requirements such as:

High Availability, Scalability and Failover

Customers expect fast response times, they expect the application to always be functional and available and that means load balancing, active monitoring and seamless failover. Both software and hardware infrastructures need to accommodate these situations. For example, you should not develop an application that cannot run simultaneously on multiple servers and possibly in multiple locations.

Transaction Integrity and Management

The issue is keeping data in a consistent state with the typical example being a transfer of funds between two accounts. The unit of work of withdrawing from one account and depositing into another needs to be committed or rolledback in an all or nothing manner to avoid the possibility of leaving data in an inconsistent and corrupt state. An application architecture should include a documented approach to handling transactions and ensuring data consistency.

Backups and Disaster Recovery

A fast and efficient backup strategy must be incorporated in the overall architecture and design. Factors such as whether databases can be backed up while online or whether downtime is required need to be considered in the uptime and availability requirements as well as be incorporated within the disaster recovery planning.

System Administration and Maintenance

After all is said and done and the system or application is functioning and highly available in production, will you be able to perform maintenance while the system is running? Can sections of the infrastructure be taken offline to do upgrades, apply patches and install new versions of software? An integrated vision is key to ensuring that your system can be managed, backed up, recovered and incorporate real-time failover.