IT infrastructure in most organizations is a separate department that operates and manages the IT environment of an enterprise. We as Solution Architects are confined to our landscape and very seldom dive deep into the hardware and network services that directly impact our applications.
One of the critical factor is the Network Bandwidth that can make or break an Architecture's performance. Network bandwidths are not infinite and directly impact the Cost, Speed, and Performance of applications. It is very essential to understand how much bandwidth is allocated to a given set of applications and what all applications are controlled by the network. As the network traffic increases, the network bandwidth increases clogging the applications.
I once at a client encountered a situation in an on-premise environment where a massive 10 TB file transfer brought an entire network to its knees. The transfer was initiated without proper planning, and it quickly saturated the available bandwidth. As a result, critical business applications slowed down, and some systems even crashed due to timeout errors. Employees couldn't access essential resources, and customer-facing services experienced significant delays.
This incident taught the importance of implementing robust traffic shaping and prioritization mechanisms. Post that incident, the client network team always had a bandwidth alert. They also ensured that large data transfers were scheduled during off-peak hours and that critical services have guaranteed bandwidth allocations.
No comments:
Post a Comment