It identifies a set of general design
principles to facilitate good design in the cloud:
1- Stop
guessing your capacity needs:
Eliminate guessing about your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a
capacity decision before you deploy a system, you might end up sitting on
expensive idle resources or dealing with the performance implications of
limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems can go away. You can use
as much or as little capacity as you need, and scale up and down automatically.
2- Test
systems at production scale: In the
cloud, you can create a production-scale test environment on demand, complete
your testing, and then decommission the resources. Because you only pay for the
test environment when it’s running, you can simulate your live environment for
a fraction of the cost of testing on premises.
3- Automate
to make architectural experimentation easier:
Automation allows you to create and replicate your systems at low cost and
avoid the expense of manual effort. You can track changes to your automation,
audit the impact, and revert to previous parameters when necessary.
4- Allow for
evolutionary architectures: Allow for
evolutionary architectures. In a traditional environment, architectural
decisions are often implemented as static, one-time events, with a few major
versions of a system during its lifetime. As a business and its context
continue to change, these initial decisions might hinder the system’s ability
to deliver changing business requirements. In the cloud, the capability to
automate and test on demand lowers the risk of impact from design changes. This
allows systems to evolve over time so that businesses can take advantage of
innovations as a standard practice.
5- Drive
architectures using data: In the
cloud you can collect data on how your architectural choices affect the
behavior of your workload. This lets you make fact-based decisions on how to
improve your workload. Your cloud infrastructure is code, so you can use that
data to inform your architecture choices and improvements over time.
6- Improve
through game days: Test how your
architecture and processes perform by regularly scheduling game days to
simulate events in production. This will help you understand where improvements
can be made and can help develop organizational experience in dealing with
events.