2.5. The Software/Hardware Divide

The role of software engineer is typically as the title suggestsengineering software. When building a desktop application or writing a mainframe system, you're more or less stuck with the hardware you have. For modern web applications, designing an application goes beyond the realm of simply designing and writing code. Hardware starts to come into play.

It's probably a mistake to think about hardware in too much isolation from the software you design, leaving the nuts and bolts of it to system administrators or site operations staff. From the start of your application design, you'll want to work closely with the person managing your hardware, or even take on that role yourself.

With that said, the level at which you get involved with the hardware side of things can vary greatly. As a software architect, you won't really need to decide which RAID card your file servers use (beyond checking that it has a battery backup, which we'll talk about in Chapter 8) or which particular network interface cards you're using (beyond the speed). In the rest of this chapter, we'll look at some general issues surrounding hardware platforms for web applications so that we can at least have a working knowledge of some of the issues involved, even if we avoid taking part ourselves.