[Azure] Architecting Cloud Applications

Introduction

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/

Architecture styles

• N-tier application
• Microservices
• Event-driven architecture
• Web-queue-worker
• Big compute
• Big data

Application design principles

Follow these design principles to make your application more scalable, resilient, and manageable.

• Design for self healing. In a distributed system, failures happen. Design your application to be self healing when failures occur.
• Make all things redundant. Build redundancy into your application, to avoid having single points of failure.
• Minimize coordination. Minimize coordination between application services to achieve scalability.
• Design to scale out. Design your application so that it can scale horizontally, adding or removing new instances as demand requires.
• Partition around limits. Use partitioning to work around database, network, and compute limits.
• Design for operations. Design your application so that the operations team has the tools they need.
• Use managed services. When possible, use platform as a service (PaaS) rather than infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
• Use the best data store for the job. Pick the storage technology that is the best fit for your data and how it will be used.
• Design for evolution. All successful applications change over time. An evolutionary design is key for continuous innovation.
• Build for the needs of business. Every design decision must be justified by a business requirement.

Five pillars of software quality

• Cost. Managing costs to maximize the value delivered.
• DevOps. Operations processes that keep a system running in production.
• Resiliency. The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function.
• Scalability. The ability of a system to adapt to changes in load.
• Security. Protecting applications and data from threats.

Cloud Design Patterns

Caterogies

• Availability
• Data management
• Design and implementation
• Management and monitoring
• Messaging
• Performance and scalability
• Resiliency
• Security

Patterns

• Ambassador
• Anti-corruption Layer
• Asynchronous Request-Reply
• Backends for Frontends
• Bulkhead
• Cache-Aside
• Choreography
• Circuit Breaker
• Claim Check
• Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)
• Compensating Transaction
• Competing Consumers
• Compute Resource Consolidation
• Event Sourcing
• External Configuration Store
• Federated Identity
• Gatekeeper
• Gateway Aggregation
• Gateway Offloading
• Gateway Routing
• Health Endpoint Monitoring
• Index Table
• Leader Election
• Materialized View
• Pipes and Filters
• Priority Queue
• Publisher/Subscriber
• Queue-Based Load Leveling
• Retry
• Scheduler Agent Supervisor
• Sequential Convoy
• Sharding
• Sidecar
• Static Content Hosting
• Strangler
• Throttling
• Valet Key

Best practices for Cloud application

• API design
• API implementation
• Autoscaling
• Background jobs
• Caching
• Content Delivery Network
• Data partitioning
• Data partitioning strategies (by service)
• Deployment stamp
• Monitoring and diagnostics
• Retry guidance for specific services
• Transient fault handling