Overcoming IT Complexity

Chapter 3. Moving to an Adaptive Architecture

One of the greatest advancements that the modern cloud era has brought us is the development and growth of the adaptive architecture. An adaptive architecture helps IT organizations build applications and systems that are more flexible and hence more agile. When used properly, this is the leading component in decreasing IT infrastructure costs associated with cloud computing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, adaptive architectures are an important tool for reducing IT complexity and hence technical debt.

One of the greatest tools that the modern cloud era has brought us is the development and growth of the adaptive architecture.

But what is an adaptive architecture?

Adaptive Architectures

An adaptive architecture is any architecture design that is able to be changed dynamically and programmatically without the need for physical intervention or manual operations.

The left side of Figure 3-1 shows a traditional architecture. Human operators manually interact with the individual infrastructure components—servers, switches, network cables, and so on—and make the changes required to adapt to the organization’s evolving needs. If additional server resources are needed, someone physically goes in and adds a new server to the rack, wires it up, and gets it up and running. This process could take days, weeks, or even months in some cases. In contrast, in an adaptive architecture such as that offered by a cloud computing provider ...