Cloud Architecture
167 items tagged with "cloud-architecture"
Best Practices11
AWS Well-Architected Framework
A set of cloud design principles and check-lists for building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient workloads on AWS.
Azure Well-Architected Framework
Microsoft’s five-pillar guidance (reliability, security, cost, performance, ops) for designing and operating workloads on Azure.
Google Cloud Architecture Framework
Prescriptive guidance covering reliability, cost, performance, security, and operational excellence for GCP workloads.
Twelve-Factor App Methodology
Twelve practical guidelines for building modern, portable, cloud-ready web applications.
Strangler Fig Modernization Pattern
Incrementally replacing legacy systems by routing new functionality to a new service while ‘strangling’ the old.
AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar
AWS guidance for reducing the environmental impact of cloud workloads by maximizing utilization, right-sizing, and choosing efficient regions, services, and hardware.
Cloud Migration 7 Rs Strategy
A decision framework for choosing how to migrate each application to the cloud across seven options: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, and refactor.
Cloud Landing Zone
A pre-configured, secure, multi-account cloud foundation with baked-in identity, networking, governance, and guardrails so teams can deploy workloads safely at scale.
Cell-Based Architecture
An architecture that partitions a system into independent, self-contained cells, each serving a subset of traffic, to limit blast radius and scale through replication.
Medallion Architecture
A layered data design that refines data through Bronze (raw), Silver (cleaned and conformed), and Gold (business-ready) tables to improve quality and reuse.
Data Lakehouse Architecture
An architecture that combines the low-cost, open storage of a data lake with the transactions, schema, and performance of a data warehouse using open table formats.
Patterns33
Strangler Fig Pattern
Incrementally migrate a legacy system by gradually replacing pieces of functionality with new applications
Ambassador
An out-of-process helper that proxies network calls on behalf of an application, handling connectivity concerns transparently.
Adapter Microservice
A microservice that translates between an application and an external system with an incompatible interface or protocol.
Service Mesh
A dedicated infrastructure layer that manages service-to-service communication via co-located proxies and a central control plane.
Leader Election
Designates a single instance among many to coordinate work, with automatic failover if the leader becomes unavailable.
Distributed Lock
Coordinates exclusive access to a shared resource across multiple processes or nodes that do not share memory.
Consistent Hashing
Distributes keys across nodes so that adding or removing a node remaps only a small fraction of keys.
Externalized Configuration
Stores configuration outside the application artifact so the same build runs unchanged across environments.
Cache-Aside
Load data into a cache on demand from a data store to improve read performance and reduce load on the backing store.
Competing Consumers
Enable multiple concurrent consumers to process messages from the same queue to increase throughput and improve resilience.
Queue-Based Load Leveling
Use a queue between tasks and a service to smooth intermittent heavy loads and protect the service from being overwhelmed.
Throttling
Control the consumption of resources by an instance, tenant, or service so a system stays within capacity under load.
Claim Check
Store a large message payload externally and pass only a reference through the messaging system to avoid moving bulky data.
Valet Key
Issue a client a token granting scoped, time-limited direct access to a resource, offloading data transfer from the application.
Gatekeeper
Protect services by brokering all client requests through a dedicated host that validates and sanitizes them before forwarding.
Federated Identity
Delegate authentication to an external identity provider so applications trust tokens rather than managing credentials themselves.
Compensating Transaction
Undo the completed steps of a multi-step operation when one step fails, restoring consistency without distributed ACID transactions.
Geode
Deploy independent geographically distributed nodes that each serve any request, placing compute close to users worldwide.
Deployment Stamps
Deploy multiple independent copies of a full application stack to scale, isolate tenants, and contain failures.
Static Content Hosting
Serve static assets from storage or a CDN instead of application servers to cut load, latency, and cost.
External Configuration Store
Move configuration out of deployment packages into a central external store shared and updated across application instances.
Health Endpoint Monitoring
Expose health-check endpoints that monitoring tools and load balancers probe to verify an application is functioning correctly.
Index Table
Create secondary index tables over data stores queried by non-key fields to speed up lookups that would otherwise scan.
Materialized View
Precompute and store read-optimized views of data so expensive queries become fast lookups against ready-made results.
Pipes and Filters
Decompose complex processing into a sequence of independent components connected by channels so each step can scale and evolve.
Sequential Convoy
Process related messages in order while still processing unrelated messages in parallel, by grouping them into ordered sets.
Rate Limiting
Constrain the rate of operations against a service or resource to stay within quotas and avoid throttling or overload.
Retry
Automatically reattempt a failed operation that is likely transient, using backoff and limits to recover without user impact.
Rate Limiter
Caps how many requests a client or system may make in a time window, protecting services from overload, abuse, and runaway cost.
Load Shedding
Deliberately rejects or drops lower-priority work when a system nears capacity, preserving stability and protecting high-priority requests under overload.
Graceful Degradation
Keeps core functionality working by selectively disabling or simplifying non-essential features when parts of a system fail or are overloaded.
Hedged Requests
Sends a duplicate request to another replica after a delay, taking whichever response returns first to cut tail latency from slow servers.
Request Coalescing
Merges multiple concurrent identical requests into a single backend call and shares the result, preventing duplicate work and cache-stampede overload.
Anti-Patterns16
Big Bang Migration
Attempting to migrate an entire system at once instead of incrementally
Distributed Monolith
Splitting a monolith into microservices that are still tightly coupled and must be deployed together
Golden Hammer
Using a familiar technology for every problem regardless of fit
Lava Flow
Dead code that no one dares to remove because they don't understand it
Migration Feature Creep
Adding new features or improvements during a migration instead of focusing on parity
Vendor Lock-In
Designing a system so deeply around one provider's proprietary services that switching becomes prohibitively expensive, eroding negotiating power and portability.
Stovepipe System
Independently built, siloed systems that duplicate capabilities and cannot interoperate because each was designed in isolation without shared standards.
Chatty I/O
Making many small, fine-grained remote or storage calls where a few coarse-grained calls would do, multiplying latency and overhead per operation.
N+1 Network Calls
Fetching a list, then making one additional remote call per item to enrich it, so a single logical operation fans out into N+1 dependency calls.
Retry Storm
Aggressive, uncoordinated retries during a partial outage that multiply traffic against an already-struggling dependency and turn a blip into a full collapse.
Thundering Herd
Many clients or threads waking and acting at the same instant — on a recovery, a timer, or a wakeup — creating a synchronized load spike that overwhelms the resource they target.
Hot Partition (Hot Shard)
A partitioning key that sends a disproportionate share of traffic to one shard, overloading it while the rest sit idle and capping the system at one node's throughput.
Missing Back-Pressure
A producer that pushes work faster than the consumer can handle, with no mechanism to slow it down, so queues grow unbounded until memory or the downstream collapses.
Premature Scaling
Building for massive scale before there is load to justify it, paying the cost and complexity of distributed systems to solve problems the product does not yet have.
Lift and Shift Without Optimization
Moving applications to the cloud unchanged and stopping there, inheriting on-prem inefficiencies while paying cloud prices and gaining none of the benefits.
Single Region, No Disaster Recovery
Running an entire system in one region or data center with no disaster-recovery plan, so a regional failure takes everything down with no recovery path.
Tutorials5
Building Event-Driven Systems with Kafka
Create scalable event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka
How to design a VPC with public and private subnets on AWS
Build a secure AWS VPC with public and private subnets, NAT, and route tables using Terraform.
How to configure EC2 Auto Scaling groups on AWS
Set up an EC2 Auto Scaling group with a launch template, target tracking policies, and health checks.
How to build a multi-region active-active app on AWS
Architect a multi-region active-active application on AWS with Route 53, global tables, and health-based failover.
How to design a VPC and firewall rules on Google Cloud
Build a custom-mode VPC on Google Cloud with subnets, firewall rules, and Cloud NAT for private workloads.
Blueprints11
Monolith to Microservices Blueprint
Complete migration blueprint for decomposing a monolithic application into microservices architecture
Legacy Java to Spring Boot Blueprint
Step-by-step migration from legacy Java EE applications to modern Spring Boot
AWS to Multi-Cloud Blueprint
Strategy for evolving from AWS-only to multi-cloud architecture
Lift-and-Shift to Re-Platform Blueprint
Take rehosted cloud workloads from a lift-and-shift phase and progressively re-platform them onto managed and serverless services for better cost and operations.
Single-Region to Multi-Region Active-Active Blueprint
Evolve a single-region cloud deployment into a multi-region active-active architecture for resilience, low latency, and disaster recovery.
On-Prem to Hybrid Cloud Blueprint
Build a hybrid cloud that keeps regulated or latency-bound workloads on-prem while extending elastic workloads to public cloud with consistent networking and governance.
Active-Passive DR to Active-Active Resilience Blueprint
Convert a cold or warm active-passive disaster-recovery setup into an always-on active-active architecture that uses all capacity and removes failover risk.
VM-Deployed App to Cloud-Native Blueprint
Re-platform a VM-deployed backend application to a cloud-native architecture with containers, managed services, and twelve-factor config.
Stateful Monolith to Stateless Services Blueprint
Re-architect a session-bound stateful backend into horizontally scalable stateless services with externalized session and cache state.
COBOL Mainframe to Java on Cloud Blueprint
Modernize COBOL/CICS mainframe applications to Java microservices on the cloud using domain decomposition and the strangler-fig pattern.
SAP ECC to S/4HANA Blueprint
Migrate SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA using a brownfield, greenfield, or selective-data approach with clean-core principles.
Reference Architectures21
Monolith to Microservices Migration
Step-by-step architecture for decomposing monolithic applications into microservices
Multi-Region Active-Active
Architecture for globally distributed applications with active-active failover
Multi-Region Active-Active Web Platform
A multi-cloud active-active web platform serving users from multiple regions with global routing and replicated data for high availability.
Autoscaling Web Tier on AWS
A classic three-tier web application on AWS with an autoscaling compute tier behind a load balancer and a managed relational database.
Batch and HPC on Azure
A scalable batch and high-performance computing platform on Azure Batch with spot compute, parallel storage, and a job scheduler.
Edge Compute and CDN Platform
A globally distributed edge platform running compute at CDN points of presence for ultra-low-latency personalization and API responses.
Hybrid Cloud Bursting Platform
A hybrid platform that runs steady workloads on-premises and bursts peak demand to public cloud Kubernetes for elastic capacity.
Multi-Cloud Portable Container Platform
A portable Kubernetes platform deployed identically across AWS, Azure, and GCP using GitOps and infrastructure as code to avoid lock-in.
On-Prem to Kubernetes Landing Zone
A cloud landing zone for migrating on-premises virtual machine workloads to Kubernetes with networking, identity, and governance baked in.
Hub-and-Spoke Cloud Network on Azure
Centralized hub virtual network for shared services with isolated spoke networks for workloads, connected by peering.
Secure Landing Zone on Google Cloud
Opinionated, policy-governed foundation of folders, projects, networking, and guardrails for onboarding workloads safely.
Cloud Security Posture Management
Continuous, agentless detection of misconfigurations and compliance drift across AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts.
Global Edge API Gateway
A globally distributed edge gateway that authenticates, caches, and routes API traffic close to users across multiple regions.
Multi-Tenant SaaS Platform
A single application instance serving many customer tenants with isolated data, per-tenant configuration, and usage-based billing.
Mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS)
A managed backend providing authentication, database, storage, push, and serverless functions to native and cross-platform mobile apps.
Content Platform with Global CDN
A high-traffic content site delivering articles and media worldwide through a multi-tier CDN cache in front of a publishing backend.
Headless CMS Content Architecture
A content repository exposing structured content over APIs to multiple front ends, decoupling authoring from presentation.
IoT Ingestion Platform
A platform that ingests telemetry from large device fleets over MQTT, processes it as a stream, and stores it for analytics and control.
Video Streaming Platform
A platform that ingests, transcodes, packages, and delivers on-demand and live video at scale using adaptive bitrate over a CDN.
Three-Tier Web Application
The classic presentation, application, and data tiers deployed on virtual machines behind a load balancer with a managed database.
Cross-Platform Mobile App Architecture
A single Flutter or React Native codebase targeting iOS and Android, backed by a REST/GraphQL API gateway and offline cache.
Playbooks10
Microservices Migration Playbook
Complete operational guide for decomposing a monolith into microservices
AWS Landing Zone Rollout Playbook
A phased program to establish a secure, multi-account AWS foundation with guardrails, networking, and identity before workloads arrive.
Azure Landing Zone Rollout Playbook
A phased program to deploy an enterprise-scale Azure landing zone with management groups, policy guardrails, hub-spoke networking, and subscription vending.
GCP Landing Zone Rollout Playbook
A phased program to build a Google Cloud foundation with a resource hierarchy, org policies, shared VPC networking, and automated project factory.
Multi-Region Resilience Program Playbook
A phased program to make a critical application survive a full regional outage through active-active or active-passive multi-region architecture.
Hybrid Cloud Operating Model Playbook
A phased program to run on-premises and public cloud as one operating model with consistent identity, networking, governance, and delivery.
Multi-Cloud Operating Model Playbook
A phased program to operate workloads across two or more public clouds with consistent governance, identity, and delivery while avoiding accidental lock-in.
COBOL Mainframe Modernization Program Playbook
A risk-managed program to modernize COBOL mainframe applications toward Java services with parallel-run validation.
Serverless Backend Migration Program Playbook
A program to migrate suitable backend workloads to serverless functions with cost, cold-start, and observability controls.
SAP S/4HANA Program Playbook
A program for migrating from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, covering readiness, custom code remediation, and a phased conversion or greenfield approach.
Checklists12
AWS Landing Zone Setup Checklist
Stand up a secure, multi-account AWS foundation with guardrails, networking, and logging before workloads arrive.
Azure Landing Zone Setup Checklist
Build an enterprise-scale Azure landing zone with management groups, policy, networking, and identity ready for workloads.
GCP Landing Zone Setup Checklist
Establish a secure Google Cloud foundation with a resource hierarchy, org policies, shared VPC, and centralized logging.
Multi-Region Failover Readiness Checklist
Verify your application can fail over to a secondary region and meet its recovery objectives under a regional outage.
AWS Well-Architected Review Checklist
Run a structured Well-Architected review across the six pillars to find and prioritize risks in an AWS workload.
Multi-Cloud Migration Readiness Checklist
Assess whether your organization is ready to operate across more than one cloud provider before committing to multi-cloud.
Serverless Production Readiness Checklist
Confirm a serverless application is observable, secure, resilient, and cost-aware before it serves production traffic.
Twelve-Factor App Compliance Checklist
Assess an application against the twelve-factor methodology to confirm it is cloud-ready and operationally portable.
Strangler-Fig Rollout Checklist
Plan and execute a strangler-fig migration that incrementally replaces a legacy system behind a routing facade.
Legacy Mainframe Modernization Readiness Checklist
Assess readiness to modernize a COBOL or mainframe application, covering discovery, data, and a phased rehost-or-rewrite decision.
COBOL Mainframe Modernization Assessment Checklist
Assess a COBOL mainframe estate for modernization, covering inventory, data, batch dependencies, and a 7 Rs migration strategy.
SAP S/4HANA Readiness Checklist
Assess data, custom code, and integrations before migrating an SAP ECC landscape to S/4HANA.
Stacks4
Kubernetes + Istio Service Mesh Stack
Cloud-native platform stack pairing Kubernetes orchestration with the Istio service mesh for traffic management, security, and observability.
Amazon Bedrock RAG
A managed RAG stack on AWS using Amazon Bedrock foundation models with Knowledge Bases for retrieval over data stored in S3.
Vertex AI Pipeline
A managed MLOps stack on Google Cloud using Vertex AI Pipelines to orchestrate training, evaluation, and deployment of ML models.
Amazon SageMaker MLOps
A managed MLOps stack on AWS using Amazon SageMaker to build, train, deploy, and monitor machine learning models end to end.
FAQs11
What is serverless computing?
Serverless computing is a cloud model where the provider automatically provisions, scales, and manages the servers, so developers deploy code that run...
What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS?
These are the three main cloud service models, distinguished by how much the provider manages. **IaaS** (Infrastructure as a Service) provides raw com...
What is autoscaling in the cloud?
Autoscaling automatically adjusts the number of running resources, such as virtual machines, containers, or pods, in response to demand or defined met...
What is a cloud landing zone?
A landing zone is a pre-configured, secure, and scalable cloud environment that establishes a baseline for accounts, networking, identity, security, a...
What is the difference between cloud regions and availability zones?
A region is a distinct geographic area where a cloud provider operates data centers, chosen for proximity to users, latency, and data-residency requir...
What is multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud is the practice of using services from more than one cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, within a single organization or...
What is the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud?
Hybrid cloud combines private infrastructure, such as on-premises data centers or a private cloud, with one or more public clouds, integrating them so...
What does cloud native mean?
Cloud native describes an approach to building and running applications that fully exploits the elasticity, automation, and managed services of the cl...
Monolith vs microservices: which should I choose?
A monolith packages all functionality into a single deployable unit, which keeps development, testing, and deployment simple and is usually the right ...
What is Domain-Driven Design (DDD)?
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is an approach to building software that puts the business domain and its language at the center of the design. It encourag...
What is the Twelve-Factor App methodology?
The Twelve-Factor App is a set of principles for building cloud-native, portable, and scalable software-as-a-service applications. Key factors include...
Glossaries31
Microservices
An architectural style structuring an application as a collection of loosely coupled, independently deployable services
API Gateway
A server that acts as a single entry point for API calls, handling routing, composition, and cross-cutting concerns
Cutover
The point in migration when traffic or operations switch from the old system to the new
Polyglot Persistence
Using different data storage technologies for different data storage needs within an application
Bounded Context
A central pattern in Domain-Driven Design that defines clear boundaries within which a model is defined
Cloud-Native
An approach to building and running applications that fully exploits the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model
Distributed Systems
Computing systems where components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages
Domain Model
A conceptual model of a business domain that incorporates both behavior and data, representing the key entities and their relationships
SOA
Service-Oriented Architecture - an architectural style where applications are composed of loosely coupled, interoperable services
Entity
An object defined primarily by its identity rather than its attributes, maintaining continuity through state changes over time
Event-Driven Architecture
A software architecture pattern where the flow of the program is determined by events such as user actions or messages from other systems
Messaging
A communication pattern where systems exchange data through messages, often asynchronously
REST
Representational State Transfer - an architectural style for designing networked applications using HTTP methods
Value Object
An object that is defined by its attributes rather than its identity, with no distinct lifecycle
Availability Zone
An availability zone is one or more discrete data centers within a cloud region, with independent power, cooling, and networking, designed to be isolated from failures in other zones.
Region
A region is a geographic area where a cloud provider operates a cluster of data centers, organized into availability zones, in which customers deploy and store resources.
Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy is a software architecture in which a single deployment serves multiple customers, called tenants, while keeping each tenant's data and configuration logically isolated.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a service is a cloud model that provides on-demand access to fundamental computing resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networking, which customers manage themselves.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a service is a cloud model that provides a managed application platform, handling servers, runtimes, and scaling so developers focus on code rather than infrastructure.
Edge Computing
Edge computing is a model that runs processing and storage close to where data is generated or consumed, rather than in a centralized cloud region, to reduce latency and bandwidth use.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network is a geographically distributed set of servers that cache and serve content from locations near users, reducing latency and offloading origin servers.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
A virtual private cloud is a logically isolated section of a public cloud where a customer can define their own private network, including subnets, IP ranges, routing, and firewall rules.
Shared Responsibility Model
The shared responsibility model is a cloud security framework that divides security duties between the provider, who secures the cloud infrastructure, and the customer, who secures what they run in the cloud.
Operator Pattern
The Operator pattern is a Kubernetes approach that encodes operational knowledge for a specific application into custom controllers and custom resources, automating tasks like deployment, upgrades, backup, and failover.
Control Plane (Kubernetes)
The control plane is the set of Kubernetes components that manage the cluster's overall state, making global decisions such as scheduling and responding to events to drive the cluster toward its desired state.
Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is a Kubernetes controller that automatically adjusts the number of pod replicas in a workload based on observed metrics such as CPU utilization or custom metrics.
Monolith
A monolith is an application built and deployed as a single, unified unit, where all functionality runs in one process or codebase rather than being split into independent services.
Modular Monolith
A modular monolith is a single deployable application whose internal code is organized into well-isolated modules with explicit boundaries, combining a monolith's simple operations with microservice-style separation of concerns.
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)
CQRS is a pattern that separates the model used to change data (commands) from the model used to read data (queries), allowing each side to be optimized, scaled, and evolved independently.
Event Sourcing
Event sourcing is a pattern that stores the full history of changes to application state as an immutable sequence of events, reconstructing current state by replaying those events rather than storing only the latest snapshot.
Idempotent Operation
An idempotent operation produces the same result whether it is performed once or many times, so repeating it has no additional effect beyond the first successful application.