Flexible cloud architectures: Decision making best practices

Description

The ecosystem in which we are building our solutions is rapidly growing. So too do architectural best practices—they tend to change over time. It becomes challenging to make the right decision and keep track of the expanding sea of options surrounding us. While it’s relatively easy to build a system that satisfies given functional requirements, it isn’t always clear what the path is to failure-proof, manageable, flexible solutions that are ready to adjust to future changes.

Lena Hall and Adron Hall look at the solution architecture of distributed cloud native systems, which often consist of numerous components. They cover the most common questions you’ll face:

• Given the trade-offs, in which cases should you run components on dedicated servers, on VMs, using managed services, independent cloud offerings, or in containers on Kubernetes, when all choices seem like viable options?
• You want to conveniently manage your cloud systems, but should you choose Terraform, AWS CloudFormation or Azure Resource Manager, Pulumi, or maybe some container multicloud control plane?
• Since cloud providers and offerings change so frequently, how do you choose the best option or decide between using services of different clouds for respective parts of your systems, without being locked into one particular provider?

The key to making the right architectural decisions is understanding technical nuances, differences, and limitations of the components you’re evaluating—quite a challenging process. Lena and Adron cover best practices for flexible systems, their integration points, and many things “in between” code. You’ll walk away aware of the trade-offs, benefits, limitations, and future potential of many existing options. You can form a decision-making framework that will help solution architects ask the right questions and make the right choices for architectural scenarios in the cloud native world of multicloud, automation, serverless, and containers and help build systems that can adjust to change and resist failure.