Building Well-Architected Solutions on Cloud

We can easily build, deploy and manage our solutions on the cloud. But, the most challenging part would be building and maintaining an application that needs to be up all the time.

A well-Architected solution abides to the tenets of service quality such as:

• Reliability
• Security
• Operational Excellence
• Cost Optimization
• Performance Efficiency

A reliable solution is one that is highly available and resilient. Cost implications are inevitable when introducing greater reliability and high availability. This trade-off should be carefully considered.

A well-Architected solution considers security throughout the entire lifecycle and incorporates Azure platform's security components to protect from various threats to the solution. A well-architected solution also considers the board security aspects such as Identity Management, Data sovereignty and Data Encryption.

Operational Excellence is yet another key part of a well-Architected Solution. In these solutions, deployments will be consistent, reliable and predictable. All the deployments will be automated to eliminate human error. Roll back or roll forward is quick if upgrades has problems. Solution will be monitored constantly and the application upgrades will be deployed without downtime.

A well-Architected solution considers generating incrementaly value early. It leverages the build-measure-learn feedback loop as a process for building empathy with customers, measuring their reactions, and ?learning what adjustments to make that improve customer interactions. A well-Architected solution demostrates Cost Optimization by balancing business goals with buudgets and avoid captial-intensive approaches. It incorporates approriate scale-in and scale-out approaches instead of an high configuration instance and incoporates budget alerts, policies to monitor and to control the spending.

Performance Efficiency is critical for any solution or an application. A well-Architected solution achieves performance efficiency by considering the scalability factory of the solution. It understands the behaviour of the solution when it is under high load and incorpates measure to scale the system automatically when it under high stress. Apart from the infrastructure scaling the solution implementation also incoporates patterns such as:

• CQRS: for segregating the read and write operations using seperate interfaces.
• Cache-Aside: Loads data on demand into a cache and server the data from cache.
• Sharding: Divides the data into a set of horizontal partitions or shards.
• Queue-Based Load Levelling: Uses a queue that acts as a buffer between a task and a service that it invokes in order to smooth intermittent heavy loads.
• Deployment Stamps: Deploys multiple independent copies of application components, including data stores.
• Geocodes: Backend services will be deployed into geographical nodes or region, each of which service any request for any client in any geographical region.

Applying the above 5 tenets into your solution will result in efficient, secure, reliable, and optimized execution of your applications.?However, companies that apply these tenets to the design of their business processes and information structures will generate significant improvements to their operational effectiveness and profitability.