Software Performance Architecture Master Class: Welcome to the ultimate destination for mastering the art of software performance architecture!

Greetings and welcome to my Software Performance Architecture Master Class book. In this book, we will be focusing on software system performance as the first key pillar of a well-structured, software solution-architected system.

We are going to discuss the solution architect mindset, as it is very important that we start with the correct mindset before diving into the topic of cloud computing performance. So here's the plan: I will be going over some of the important points that you should remember as I present the material for each lesson. So let's discuss the software solution architect mindset and best practices that you should follow when designing your application to be highly performant.

Number one, always think about the business requirements. Because if your application does not address the business requirements, including both functional and non-functional requirements, then it is going to fail regardless of how well it performs. So before you introduce a series of cloud architecture patterns and cloud services into your design, you have to make sure it meets the business requirements.

Now that we have emphasised the importance of meeting the business requirements, it is all about software performance thinking from this point forward. Having this type of thinking is important, particularly if you're developing an application from scratch or if you are introducing a completely new module to an existing architecture.

Recommendation from experience:

1. Always explore if the design is able to address the particular challenges through architecture patterns and best practices.

2. Try to minimize the amount of code required from the development teams by leveraging, as much as possible, out-of-the box cloud-native managed services and third-party components.

Lastly, remember that for any business, one of the prime non-functional requirements is to achieve the highest performance at the lowest cost.