<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>

3 server roles : Web Role, Application role, database role.

Scaling web role servers is based on user traffic and concurrent load. The main way to scale is to add servers.

Application server role : scaling based mainly on the content

Database server role : Adding storage does not mean it is performant. Ideally, content and configuration database should be hosted separately from service application database. The sizing of the database depends on how backup and restore capabilities are.

What can influence your design is of course the business and users, but also the IT best practices.

As soon as you add custom code, it impacts the performance.

Is your company really a 24/7 one ? what kind of peak event you have ? 98% of the operations are reading content.

Design first for redundancy and availability before performance. You can always improve the servers afterwards. HD failure is the most common HW failure.

Process cycle is usually Analyze, Deploy, Observe. Regarding the monitoring phase (Observe), capture real-time data and also on the host machines if virtualizing.