Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS)

Chapter 4

It Starts with Architecture

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

—Frank Lloyd Wright, U.S. architect

When constructing a house, nobody would ever consider not buying materials and tools and hiring resources as the first steps of the building process. Yet, too often in the world of IT we see teams rush to the development phase without a clear vision of what the business and technical requirements are. With cloud computing, the need for a pragmatic approach is even more critical because the risks are greater as more control is shifted to cloud service providers. Whether a company has an official enterprise architecture practice in place or not, success in the cloud is dependent on applying the basics of sound architectural principles and asking these six questions: Why, Who, What, Where, When, and How.

The Importance of Why, Who, What, Where, When, and How

There have been philosophical debates for decades on the value of enterprise architecture (EA). Architecting for the cloud does not require that an official EA organization exists within a company or that any formal EA methodology like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) or the Zachman Framework is used. However, architects should perform the necessary discovery steps that most methodologies suggest before diving headfirst into the clouds. A mistake that many companies make is picking a vendor before doing their due diligence. It is easy for a Microsoft ...