Cloud Architecting
Cloud Architecting
Section titled “Cloud Architecting”Definition and Overview
Section titled “Definition and Overview”Cloud architecture is “the practice of applying cloud characteristics to a solution that uses cloud services and features to meet an organization’s technical needs and business use cases.”
The Building Analogy
Section titled “The Building Analogy”Creating technology solutions parallels constructing a physical building:
- Customer/Decision maker: Outlines business goals and requirements
- Architect: Creates design and blueprints to meet requirements
- Building crew/Delivery team: Implements the solution from blueprints
Having well-architected systems increases the likelihood that technology deliverables will help meet business goals.
Historical Context: Amazon’s Journey
Section titled “Historical Context: Amazon’s Journey”Early Challenges (2000)
Section titled “Early Challenges (2000)”- Amazon was challenged with building an ecommerce service for third-party sellers
- Various services were difficult to separate for centralized development platform
- Development time was long and projects were complicated
Initial Solution (Early 2000s)
Section titled “Initial Solution (Early 2000s)”- Created well-documented APIs to organize development environment
- Projects still took months to complete
- It took 3 months just to build database, compute, and storage components when entire project was expected to take 3 months
- Each team built their own resources without planning for scalability or reusability
AWS Launch (2006)
Section titled “AWS Launch (2006)”Amazon built internal services to create highly available, scalable, and reliable architectures, then started selling these as AWS:
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Role of a Cloud Architect
Section titled “Role of a Cloud Architect”Cloud architects are responsible for managing an organization’s cloud computing architecture with three main phases:
- Set technical cloud strategy with business leads
- Analyze solutions for business needs and requirements
Research
Section titled “Research”- Investigate cloud services specifications and workload requirements
- Review existing workload architectures
- Design prototype solutions
- Design transformation roadmap with milestones, work streams, and owners
- Manage adoption and migration
Key Responsibilities
Section titled “Key Responsibilities”- Engage with decision makers to identify business goals and capabilities needing improvement
- Ensure alignment between technology deliverables and business goals
- Work with delivery teams implementing solutions to ensure appropriate technology features
- Develop technical cloud strategy based on business needs
- Assist with cloud migration efforts
- Review workload requirements
- Provide guidance on addressing high-risk issues
Key Benefits
Section titled “Key Benefits”You can use AWS services to create highly available, scalable, and reliable architectures. Cloud architects implement the AWS Well-Architected Framework to achieve these outcomes.
Cloud architecture enables organizations to move from manual, error-prone processes to automated, scalable solutions that can respond quickly to changing business needs while maintaining reliability and cost efficiency.