What are the most effective cloud-based system architecture patterns?

In my experience, 95% of the companies fits well on a monolithic. The main issue mostly all gets in is when you don’t have tests supporting that huge piece of software. Think about a building, every single screw you out needs a fireman revision because you don’t know what could it be wrong. Every lamp you change, you need to retest your entire installation. Tests are like light switches or breakers, you don’t test everything when you can’t turn on your desk bulb. Do tests! Even MVPs can have a little test suite where you can rely on

Effective cloud-based system architecture patterns include: 1. Microservices 2. Serverless 3. Containerization 4. Event-Driven 5. Distributed Databases 6. Caching 7. CDN 8. Auto Scaling 9. Security Layers: IAM, firewalls, and encryption. 10. DevOps and CI/CD 11. Monitoring and Logging 12. Multi-Region Redundancy

One thing that's particularly important for industry is while moving applications to Cloud Architectures extensibility is sought after .Given that relative degree of ease for lift and shift to Cloud environments determines and influences the speed of transition and execution to Cloud the propensity of application Architectures to lend themselves easily to such migration could be the key achieving faster deployment and migrations to Cloud Architectures.

I find it helps to consider systems architecture like water through a pipe. One large pipe is at first glance quicker to create and deploy but genrally harder to maintain without interruption, less versatile and nobody wants a blockage.

Solutions varies in complexity and requirements. However it also varies with the experience of the responsible for the architecture. It is very easy visualize all parts and functions as a single solution in a single shop stop. But it has drawbacks and high cost to develop as a short term solutions without planning the future possibilities and additional use cases or requirements.

While Microservices based architecture patterns seem to be more common as it is the current trend, without a careful system design and approach this could simply become a solution that is worse than Monolithic. I have seen teams coming into do a breakdown of Monolithic application and end up with dozens of Microservices creating chaos of communication within the system. And then, to resolve those issues, adding new components, managing and developing those - it all becomes a downward spiral of list productivity. There are always pros and cons which need to be considered rather than trying to do what is trending out there - which seem to be the case most of the times. There should be no compromise when doing a system design.

Serverless stands out as a game-changer. It enables developers to focus solely on writing code, without managing servers. With Serverless, functions are executed in response to events, offering automatic scaling and cost optimization. It's the best approach for harnessing the power of the cloud, providing unparalleled agility and efficiency in software development.

It’s good to go with micro services approach. But at the same time we have to see some points before we start working on a project with microservices architecture. Team size and skill set is a key to implement this. Integration tests are hard to write when it comes to different services. What i think to be a good approach is to start with modular monolith architecture. The application is vertically sliced and we can easily convert that modular monolith to microservices as the team grows and skill set of team is appropriate according to microservices implementation.

It is hard to let something simply go, but at the same time what brought us here may not necessarily sustain our success in long term. The speed that technology evolves is impressive, specially nowadays and so has revolved the concept of breaking down complex solutions in sorte of loosing modular components intrinsically interconnected, but at the same time more flexible to modify with minimized impact on overall solution to avoid waterfall impact of one piece in the whole functionality.

Breaking down a system into small, independent services allows for flexibility, scalability, and faster development cycles. It's ideal for complex, rapidly evolving applications.

A serverless microservice is great for occasional use. However, the "pay only for what you use" model can be misleading. In cases like databases, charges for backups and storage persist even during idle periods. Serverless functions may experience delays when activated after inactivity, as they require initialization. Sometimes, a pool of generic "warm" servers is allocated, but function loading, etc adds time. To avoid this, you can opt for a dedicated plan, eliminating cold starts but incurring continuous costs.

Serverless architecture is more of the mindset and approach because you are utilizing the resources that are readily available, the art of making trade-offs with different resources/components is also needed.

"Serverless" is the odd one out in this list, more than a pattern, it moves the border behind which your system is going to be outsourced.

This pattern, such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, simplifies infrastructure management, reduces costs, and enhances scalability. It's particularly effective for event-driven and sporadically used applications.

Serverless is the ideal way to consider when you are moving away from monolithic architecture. I have faced strong opposition to this siting reasons like way too may regulatory processes, etc. That is totally wrong. In fact, if you have the pipelines done correct, your event driven and event sourcing can address these issue efficiently to support any large scale regulatory compliance. In fact, I can constantly monitor my queues and messages, and respond to business events faster than even regulatory bodies needs reports, and furthering to enhance business functionality to explore new opportunities and augmented solutions, that brings in more profit to the business. The drawbacks of serverless can be addressed as well, by good designs.

To me, this is the future of big distributed systems. Having Kafka as backbone of your entire business and let small pieces of software deal with what they are good for. The challenge comes when you need to do end to end testing for an asynchronous and distributed application. The solution I found is mock up your piece of software, make sure you generate valuable logs to troubleshoot and keep it idempotent as far as you can.

Event-Driven architecture fosters distributed design and localised responsibility for handling the incoming events, running actions and communicating the results. It resembles the way the world is organised - robustly.

Leveraging events and messages to trigger actions promotes loose coupling and real-time processing. This architecture is excellent for handling asynchronous tasks and building responsive systems.

Before jumping into Event-Driven, you must sit with BAs and ensure you have captured all business events and modeled your FSM, prove your business functions are executing and completing their tasks per the requirements and business flows. This is critical. Business process re-engineering is the primary step to event driven architecture. It might need event-sourcing and dashboard patterns to address use case aggregations, monitoring and business workflow orchestrations. Identify idempotent events, steps, failures, rate controls, circuit breakers, load balancers and gateways ahead in your business architecture model by attributing these NFR or design measures to business values or capabilities to defy future technical debts ahead.

Saying that this or that architecture “will work every time”, regardless of current project needs, will usually be wrong. Being flexible in adoption relevant technologies and architecture approaches, that fit your needs, is the key to build stabile solutions. First of all analyze your project needs, then find best approach for each project part. Consider: ease of implementation, interoperability, flexibility, costs of development, costs of underlying infrastructure and costs of long run support. Try to see if the technology your are currently considering is in line with current trends and market directions, that shall not be your major concern, but try to understand why other solutions is widely adopted compared to your choice

Every solution has its benefits, comes with different culture and experiences embedded. Knowing the value and advantages of different approaches helps to offset disadvantage of one over the other by joining efforts and strength of each approach towards one solution.

For a great hybrid approach, I recommend a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA, due to its inherent flexibility and scalability. SOA breaks down software into modular services that can be independently developed, deployed, and scaled, aligning well with the dynamic nature of cloud environments. This promotes reusability, making it cost-effective and efficient as organizations can leverage existing services. If you read my book, you will learn that SOA fosters interoperability and integration between diverse cloud services and platforms, enabling seamless communication and data exchange.

I believe the combination of managed services and ancient ways of servers/services are most cost effective Organisation can move their workload considering the benefit of cost & maintenance work.

Hybrid a no-go if you can move to Cloud totally. Try to avoid being in the situation for long-term. It can kill your profits and increase your operational costs rather decrease by more OPEX and CAPEX for the same solution delivered. Your management might even think against going to Cloud if not done correct. Business context is vital for staying hybrid, like a reason for your business services are rendered at the edge compute points, and you need to integrate with IoT devices, etc. Consider migrate forward options where possible, and don't try to reach back to on-prem solutions often in your designs. Move forward is the way to go. Consider hybrid when you see clean dependencies, and no backward data movements.

Borrowing from the first “architects”, I believe in form follows function, even in our world of systems architecture. Before worrying about patterns, technologies first keep your end goal in mind and work towards that based on the most fit for purpose capabilities. Personally I fall into the hybrid model, but that includes the use of each type of architecture principles exclusively, dependent on the ultimate business outcome requirement. I have lived the world of old school monolithic patterns being used where they have no earthly reason for use as well as the new at the dance micro-service patterns doing things that could have been done with several lines of the previous patterns.

There is a famous quote - "one size doesn't fit all" simply because the architecture is completely dependent on what is the solution, what is the use-case, and why a specific architecture would be appropriate for this solution.

Event-Driven stands out as a paramount pattern. It empowers applications to respond instantly to events or messages, fostering scalability, decoupling, and real-time capabilities. Event-Driven Architecture is the best approach for orchestrating modern systems, enabling agility, seamless integration, and efficient data flow.

Introducing Docker and, later, Kubernetes and similar platforms radically changed rules of the game. Now it does not really matter where to deploy your solution, and, frankly, what to deploy. The only thing that matters is overall efficiency of your solution and how is it ready for high load challenges if they are expected.

The effectiveness of these architecture patterns lies in their adaptability to different use cases. The key is to choose and adapt them to align with the unique requirements of your specific project. It's essential to stay up-to-date with the evolving cloud landscape and continuously evaluate and refine your architecture to ensure it remains effective and efficient.