Cloud Native Architecture

Designing for automation from the beginning means creating repeatable processes that work every time or fail and roll back to a safe state. Automated monitoring can be set up to watch for issues, send alerts, and trigger automatic responses. If traffic is spiking, automated systems can dynamically increase capacity or deploy additional resources, so your site continues to run smoothly. Then, once the load subsides, resources can be halted and capacity reduced to keep your bill as small as possible. Cloud providers prioritize effort on APIs (application programming interfaces), allowing for automated programmatic control of all their services.

When possible, building a solution that doesn’t store state allows you to optimize resources for the cloud’s load-balanced and scalable environment. If a service needs to keep track of everything that a user was recently doing to serve them the correct content, the user must keep communicating with the same service. If that service is stateless, then a user can talk to any of dozens of copies over their browsing session without experiencing any difference. If one fails, it can be replaced without losing session data. Stateless services are easy to upgrade and easy to roll back if there is a problem.

Cloud providers tend to offer a plethora of managed services, including setting up a virtual machine and installing a database on it. Now you have a database in the cloud, but you are the one managing it. Cloud providers offer managed services, like databases designed to be fast, reliable, and scalable. Let your provider take on the management of these services and save yourself the hassle. Besides databases, you can find CI/CD pipelines, messaging services, file storage, and much more.

A side effect of being in the cloud means being more open to security threats. As a result, cloud-based services must be designed to not trust anything by default. Each component must communicate using encryption with other components and enable the minimum level of trust possible. All data should be checked for script injections and, if possible, apply rate-limiting to protect yourself from hackers. Because each component treats all other components like a threat, the system becomes much more secure and resilient.