Bringing Teams Together

The application development team is responsible for developing and maintaining a set of software components that fulfill the application’s requirements. This team is primarily concerned with meeting functional requirements quickly and flexibly. Its members seek to manage complexity by creating software abstractions that make the system easy to extend and maintain.

The system infrastructure team is responsible for building and maintaining the servers and network infrastructure. Its members are primarily concerned with such operational requirements as security, availability, reliability, and performance. Stability and predictability are critical success factors, which are primarily addressed by controlling change and by managing known good configurations.

The forces acting on the application development team are quite different from the forces acting on the system infrastructure team. The result is an inherent tension between the two teams. If this tension is not addressed, the resulting solution may be optimized for one team or the other, but it will not be an optimal business solution. Resolving the tension is a critical element for delivering a holistic, software-intensive enterprise solution that is optimized for the overall needs of the business.

The patterns in this chapter help reduce the tension between the teams by offering guidance on how to optimally structure your applications and technical infrastructure to efficiently fulfill the solution’s requirements. The patterns then discuss how to map the software structure to the hardware infrastructure. Specifically, this chapter presents a set of patterns that enable you to:

• Organize your software application into logical layers.

• Refine your logical layering approach to provide and consume services.

• Organize your hardware into physical tiers, so you can scale out.

• Refine your physical tier strategy in a three-tiered configuration.

• Allocate processes to processors with a deployment plan.