There is no denying the fact that cloud computing is one of the biggest gifts of technology because it makes storing data easier than ever before. But, in order to be secure and reliable, the cloud infrastructure itself has to be perfect. When you have a good AWS architecture design you can enjoy some of the key advantages of cloud hosting, like scalability, elasticity, power to automate management tasks etc. So, AWS cloud architecture cannot be designed in a jiffy; it has to be well planned out as it will form the very backbone of any network.

Principles Which You Can Follow To Architect The Cloud Infrastructure:

The AWS cloud architecture needs to be one which is capable of supporting user and traffic growth seamlessly without any compromise in the performance levels. The cloud architecture must also be able to guarantee linear scalability every time extra resources need to be added. So, the system should be able to adapt in order to cater to additional workloads. The designer will decide whether the architecture needs both vertical and horizontal scaling and this is according to the kind of applications being hosted. When you are building the architecture for short term, you can deploy vertical scaling; else you need horizontal scaling for distributing workloads to many resources.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of cloud hosting is that you get to treat servers like disposable resources; but these must be tested. For this you can use the immutable infrastructure system where you can replace one with another server having the latest configurations. It is necessary to ensure that coding and configuration processes are kept automated and repeatable when you introduce resources in new environments or upgrade capacity of the current system to accommodate more loads. You can use a combination of both these processes wherein some are configured through Bootstrapping while other parts of configuration are captured in golden image.

Unlike the traditional infrastructure, it is possible to automate the cloud infrastructure. This helps to boost the efficiency and stability of any company. For instance, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the quickest way to get any application running on the AWS. Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery guarantees instance recovery while Auto Scaling may allow you to keep an application available but scale the capacity up or down. So, when you are architecting the cloud infrastructure, these automaton tools are extremely handy and advantageous.

Your infrastructure must be designed such that inter-dependencies are cut down. The components should be loosely knit so that failure in one does not end up affecting the others. There should however be well-defined interfaces enabling smooth interactions within the components. Loose coupling of components can be achieved through what is called asynchronous integration where one component will generate events and the other will consume them. There is no direct interaction but through a middle storage layer. This is needed for added resiliency. Finally, it is also important to build the applications such that these may handle component failures gracefully and end users are not affected.

It is important to ensure that the architecture uses many types of storage, analytics, databases, application and deployment solutions. You can do this either through managed services which cover machine learning, queuing, emails, analytics etc, or by reducing complexity of application-running through a server-less architecture.

When you choose AWS managed cloud services can get rid of the limitations posed by licensing costs. Earlier the infrastructures also lacked ability to support different database engines. Now, one has to bear in mind three types of databases while architecting the cloud, namely, relational databases, NoSQL databases and data warehouse.

You can ensure that a system remains available at all times when it is capable of withstanding failures of multiple or individual components like servers or network links. So, you must consider ways of automating the recovery process and reducing the disruptions at each layer of the cloud infrastructure. You may introduce redundancy to do this and have many resources on standby for the same task. Even the detection of failures and reaction to them must be automated as far possible. You can also practice data center resilience with Availability Zones which are designed to lower impact of failures.

The cloud architecture has to be designed to optimize costs by selecting the right kind of storage and configurations. You can use Auto Scaling feature to scale resources up and down horizontally whenever needed without any extra expense. You may apply caching to various layers in the cloud architecture to improve cost efficiency and application performance. Caching can be of two types, application and edge caching. For instance, Amazon Cloud Front is a CDN which had many edge servers all over the globe and is an example of edge caching.

Last but not the least, security if the topmost concern and most traditional security tools may also be deployed in the cloud. To enhance security in managed AWS cloud architecture, you can build a VPS environment which isolated some parts of the architecture using security groups, subnets and routing controls. AWS also runs a shared security system where the AWS takes care of security of the cloud and the client secures the workloads.

 

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