The questions in this section focus on the processes and infrastructure that the project demands. Your team's structure and processes address some of these questions, and client needs and requirements will answer the rest. The responses further your understanding of the constraints you need to work within and provide you with sufficient opportunity to address potential shortcoming.
Here are some example scenarios to demonstrate how knowing or not knowing the answers to these questions can help or hurt your project.
A partner was working with a client that operates a global site and required that the site would load within 1-2 seconds in every country they operate in. Because they knew that one of the biggest slowdowns to page loads in other countries are the supporting assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript, they planned to implement a CDN to load these assets.
If they had not identified that the site needed a CDN, they might have stored the assets in ways that don't support CDNs out of the box. Additionally, they knew to configure the system to be aware of the CDN, so that the links are added properly. This avoided a costly delay in the project's go-live as they would have needed to re-link assets on the site. This resulted in a site that loaded quickly from day one.
The front-end developers did not pay close attention to optimization of resources like JS, CSS stylesheets and images. This led to a home page that loaded approximately 5MB of data spread across approximately 150 requests for new visitors and visitors with expired client caches. The organization hosted the site on-premise along with other mission critical services not connected to the web site. The organization had relatively limited bandwidth and the added request load from the un-optimized home page resulted in an outage not only for the website, but for the other mission critical services.
If they considered the production environment's limitations, they could have avoided this issue by focusing more on the web site performance and considering to host this web site elsewhere. This would prevent the chain reaction from bringing down the unrelated services.
When discussing the traffic requirements for a project, a partner found that regular daily traffic is generally moderate to low, but the client expects significantly higher traffic once a quarter, due to a regular event. The partner used this knowledge to pitch Azure autoscaling features to keep costs lower while still providing capacity to handle these quarterly spikes. The client appreciated the partner's considerations of budget while maintaining performance year-round.