Any good enterprise networks should be built with the following goals in mind:
Performance
Scalability
Redundancy
The network, first and foremost, needs to be performant to meet customer needs. Customers can be end users in the data center or end users of the application in the public domain. With Continuous Delivery and deployment, if networking blocks a developer in a test environment, it is hampering a potential feature or bug fix reaching production, so it is not acceptable to have sub-standard pre-production networks and they should be designed as scaled-down functional replicas of production.
Scalability focuses on the ability to scale out the network to support company growth and demand. As more applications are added, how does the network horizontally scale? Is it cost effective? Can it easily be adapted to cater for new services such as third-party VPN access or point-to-point network integration? All these points need to be...