Cloud Architecture Patterns

Preface

This book focuses on the development of cloud-native applications. A cloud-native application is architected to take advantage of specific engineering practices that have proven successful in some of the world’s largest and most successful web properties. Many of these practices are unconventional, yet the need for unprecedented scalability and efficiency inspired development and drove adoption in the relatively small number of companies that truly needed them. After an approach has been adopted successfully enough times, it becomes a pattern. In this book, a pattern is an approach that can be duplicated to produce an expected outcome. Use of any of the patterns included in this book will impact the architecture of your application, some in small ways, some in large ways.

Historically, many of these patterns have been risky and expensive to implement, and it made sense for most companies to avoid them. That has changed. Cloud computing platforms now offer services that dramatically lower the risk and cost by shielding the application from most of the complexity. The desired benefit of using the pattern is the same, but the cost and complexity of realizing that benefit is lower. The majority of modern applications can now make practical use of these heretofore seldom used patterns.

Note

Cloud platform services simplify building cloud-native applications.

The architecture patterns described in this book were selected because they are useful for building cloud-native applications. ...