From the course: Cloud Architecture: Design Decisions

Taking your architecture to the next level

From the course: Cloud Architecture: Design Decisions

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Taking your architecture to the next level

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- What is cloud architecture? Cloud architecture is best defined as configuring cloud computing technologies and traditional technologies in a way that supports the business's current and future requirements. This means that we're leveraging technology to meet the business's needs, not the other way around. This course focuses on understanding your business's requirements and then picking the right cloud technology components or architecture to satisfy them, thus making the right design decisions. As you move through your cloud architecture journey, the availability of today's technologies, including on-demand cloud services, enables you to pick and configure as many as 10 factorials of possible technology combinations to form your cloud computing solution or architecture. If you're not sure what that number is, it's a lot. Most of these configurations will likely work, And by work, I mean they meet the business's needs minimally. However, as the word implies, these architectures are likely minimal and not optimal. This means that while they work, they may cost more to run and not meet all of the business requirements in some way. As such, many of these working cloud computing architectures end up costing businesses more money because they leverage cloud technology in an underoptimized way. Therefore, good cloud architecture is not just about creating a solid architecture. It also includes application and infrastructure level design, deployment planning, operation planning, security design, database design, and about a hundred other things that will likely make up your cloud computing architecture. It's about creating an architecture that meets the business's needs, and addresses most or all of the requirements, as well as being fully optimized. So it should work for the least amount of cost, provide the most efficiency, meet most of the business's needs, and provide the lowest amount of risk. Of course, this applies not only to the first instance of the cloud computing architecture, but also to changes that the architecture will likely undergo as it progresses into the future. In other words, it's optimized now, and will continue to be optimized to meet the business's needs moving forward. Therefore, I recommend considering these principles when you begin to develop your design. Cloud computing architecture is about creating solutions that work and are close to fully optimized as possible. It includes creating a path forward for the architecture and understanding that it needs always to be optimized to meet the business' needs. It demonstrates an understanding of things in the wide, such as strategic use of this technology, as well as things in the narrow, such as application design, and deployment details, and the use of DevOps, and other development best practices, and tooling. Remember that this is about optimizing the cloud technology to add the most value to the business. If you keep that in mind, you can't fail. It also includes application and infrastructure-level designs, deployment planning, operations planning, security design, database design, and about a hundred other things that will likely make up your cloud computing architecture. It's about creating an architecture that meets the business' needs, and addresses most or all of the requirements, as well as being fully optimized.

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