Non functional requirements like Availibility,Scalability...

Any application being built in today's world has lot of non functional requirements. 2 of the non functional requirements are Availability and Scalability.
Availability is the ability of the sysytem to serve the requests of the users for the measurable amount of time. It is a major factor when the software is deployed in a production environment. Lots of business processes will depend on the availability of the system and if the system is unavailable then it is more often then not loss to the customer using the system. If the application is a e-biz. application then its a direct loss of money while if application is something else then its a loss in productivity and hence indirect loss of money to the customer.
In a SaaS scenario availability will be of even more concern since downtime of the service may translate into the breach of a legal contract between provider and consumer of the service and can result in bigger losses for the provider of the service.
Scalability of a system can be defined as ability of the system to be able to serve the increasing demands of the system while stealing maintaining the acceptable performance levels. Once a system is online and is a success then its but natural that the it would be used by more and more people and hence it is but natural that the system would have to handle the increasing demands.
Now a system can either be Scaled Up or Scaled Out based on the increasing demands. Scaling Ua system would normally mean increasing the hardware (memory/ more processors) of the server to enable it to perform faster. Scaling Out a system would normally mean that we increase the number of servers in the landscape and try to meet the performance standard with more servers.

I believe These 2 non functional requirements will be affecting the design application .
How is something i will try to figure out and may be post it in a different post.

Clustering is a solution to meet these non functional requirements. Basically clustering is nothing but to present a group of physical servers to the client as 1 virtual resource. The requests coming from the clients to this virtual resource can be redirected to the physical servers based on various algorithms.
A logical view of such an arrangement would look something like this..

So the above picture basically depicts that we have a cluster of server 1 and server 2 which is handling requests from client based on some kind of request routing done by the virtual resource.

There are various ways of configuring a cluster based on what kind of requirements we have. I'll look into them and post on a different post....

~Abhishek