Technical standpoint

From this perspective, we will analyze all technical aspects of the premise – anything that you will need to provide the initial technical requirements of your solution.

We will analyze it in the following way:

• You can understand, from the premise, that your customer needs some kind of solution that can sustain some amount of website hits, but you can't be certain if the web server is already set up, and whether the customer only needs a load balancing solution. Alternatively, maybe the customer needs both, a web server, that is NGINX, Apache, or something of that sort, and the load balancing solution.
• The customer mentions at least 10,000 hits to their website, but they didn't mention if these hits are concurrent per second, daily, weekly, or even monthly.
• You can also see that they need to stay available during updates and be able to continue serving their website if the company has an outage, but all these statements are very general, since availability is measured in 9s. The more 9s you have, the better (in reality, this is a percentage measurement of the amount of time during the year; a 99% availability means that there can only be 526 minutes of downtime per year). Outages are also very hard to predict, and it's almost impossible to be able to say that you will never have an outage, therefore, you need to plan for it. You have to have a Recovery point objective (RPO) and a Recovery time objective (RTO) for your solution in case of a disaster. The customer didn't mention this, and it is crucial to understand how much time a business can sustain an outage.
• When it comes to budget, this is usually from a business perspective, but the technical aspects are affected directly by it. It looks like the budget in the project is tight, and the customer wants to spend as little as possible on their solution, but they're not mentioning exact numbers, which you will require in order to fit your proposals to it. Little to no upfront cost? What does this mean? Are we repurposing the existing resources and building a new solution? How can we implement a design with no upfront cost? One way to overcome low budgets, or no upfront costs, at least in software, is to utilize open source software (OSS), but this is something that we need to ask the customer.
• Gaining momentum can only mean that they are predicting that their userbase will grow eventually, but you need an estimate of how much they predict this will grow and how fast, as this will imply that you have to leave the solution ready to be scaled vertically or horizontally. Vertically, by leaving space to increase the resources eventually and take into account the business's procurement process if you need to buy more resources such RAM, CPU, or storage. Horizontally will also involve a procurement process and a considerable amount of time to integrate a new node/server/VM/container into the solution. None of these are included in the premise, and it's vital information.

Here, we have a comparison of horizontal and vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling adds more nodes, while vertical scaling adds more resources to the existing nodes:

The following is a list of example questions that you could ask to clarify the gray areas:

• Is this solution for a new/existing website or web server?
• When you say 10,000 hits, are these concurrent per second or is it daily/weekly/monthly?
• Do you have any estimates or current data of how large your userbase is?
• Considering that the budget is low, can we use OSS?
• Do you have the technical resources to support the solution in case we use OSS?
• Do you have any sort of update infrastructure in place, or version control software implemented already?
• When you say little to no upfront cost, does this mean that you already have hardware, resources, or infrastructures (virtual or cloud) available that we could recycle and/or reuse for our new solution?
• Are there any disaster recovery sites in place that we could use to provide high availability?
• If your userbase grows, will this generate more storage requirements or only compute resources?
• Do you plan on performing any backups? What is your backup scheme?

From the technical perspective, once you start designing your POCs more questions will arise based on the software or hardware that will be used in the solution. You will need to know how they fit or what is needed for them to adjust to the customer's existing infrastructure, if any.