Cloud Application Architecture Patterns

Preface

This is a book about how to architect applications so that they will run well in the cloud. It is not based on any particular technology or product. Rather, it is designed for application architects using a variety of cloud platforms and technologies. Because the concepts in this book are product-neutral and vendor-neutral, the concepts will remain relevant even as technologies evolve and as old products fall out of favor and are replaced by newer, better products. A book focused on a single product will become obsolete when the product does, but one focused on architectural concepts remains relevant as long as the architecture does, potentially even outlasting the usefulness of the platforms that host the architecture.

Because this book focuses on designing applications to be deployed on the cloud, we do assume a fundamental set of technologies that have become a de facto standard stack that applications make use of to take advantage of cloud computing. These technologies include Linux, containers, and container orchestrators. These technologies and ones like them are referenced in this book.

To get the discussion rolling, we’ll explain why we wrote this book and who we intend to read it. Adopting cloud is a very broad topic, more than can fit in one book, so we’ll discuss what you can expect to learn, what topics are covered, and what is outside the scope of this book. Lastly, we’ll give a quick overview of how this book structures the material.

Why We Wrote This Book ...