I'm not a network engineer. I just build the applications, the network professionals take care of deploying my applications and making sure they stay up. Why should I care about what hardware they use?

Because the hardware they use could influence my application architecture.

• If I know the IT guys are able to bring in new servers in response to increased demand, I start to think about distributed caching instead of replication maybe. I start to think that the application shouldn't store any data in a machine specific session so that the load balancer can send the user to any machine.
• If they have access to distributed hardware caching, maybe I don't have to worry about donut caching in my pages.
• If I know they can pull servers in and out of the clusters at will with no visible downtime to our users, I start to think about deploying more often. I can become more agile.
• If I don’t have to worry about how much space is left where I’m storing my users uploads, I don’t have to write code to check how much space is available and present an error to my users if the space fills up.

One of my goals with my F5 Devcentral blog is to explore ways that developers and IT professionals can cooperate more and blur the lines between them a bit more.