Three Key Factors In Infrastructure Design

An my experience as an Infrastructure Architect I have identified three key factors or attributes which all high performing mission critical systems must have in order to be seen to be designed correctly. These are:

1. scalablity
2. high availability
3. performance

All other factors such as fault tolerence, resilience etc can be captured under the above three factors. And technologogies such as server load balancing and clustering can fit under the high availability factor.