Cloud Design Patterns

Cloud Design Patterns

Introduction
When designing and implementing cloud applications, it's crucial to adhere to certain mandatory
categories. These encompass eight distinct categories each of which includes detailed information
on following.

Time that the system is functional including system errors, Infrastructure

issues, malicious attacks and System load; Measured as percentage of
Availability uptime;
Key element of cloud applications; Influences of quality of attributes;
Considering performance, scalability, availability and consistency; Should be
Data Management synchronized across regions if any.
Factors of consistency & coherence in component design, deployment,
Design & Implementation maintainability to simplify administration, development and reusability;
Decisions made during this phase has impact of quality, cost of ownership.
Connects to components and services; Ideal for loosely coupled for maximize
scalability; Asynchronous is widely used pattern.
Messaging
Runs in remote datacenter which is challenging to control completely;
Management & Monitoring Applications must expose runtime information for administrations and
operations; Customization and business requirement changes should effect
without stopped/redeployed.
Performance is the responsiveness to execute any action within time interval;
Scalability is to handle increases load without impacting performance;
Performance & Scalability Scalability concerns not just compute instances, including storage,
messaging, Infrastructure.
Applications are of multi-tenant, use shared platform services, compete
resources, bandwidth, communicate over internet, run on commodity
Resiliency hardware. Detecting the failures quickly and recovering quickly and efficiently
is necessary.
Prevent malicious or accidental access outside of designed usage; Prevent
disclosure or loss of information; Restrict access to only approved users and
Security
protects sensitive data.

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 Cloud Design Patterns

The Design Patterns

Following 24 design patterns are commonly and necessarily consider applying in any cloud related
applications.

Cache-aside Data Management Load data on demand into a cache from a data store; This pattern can improve
/ Perf & Scalability performance and helps to maintain consistency b/w data held in the cache and
the data in the underlying data store.
Circuit Breaker Resiliency
Handle faults that time to rectify when connecting to a remote service or
resource. This pattern can improve the stability and resiliency of an application.
Compensating Transaction Resiliency
Undo the work performed by a series of steps, if one or more of the operations
fails. Operations that follow the consistency model are commonly found in cloud-
hosted applications that implement complex business processes and workflows.
Competing Consumers
Messaging / Multiple concurrent consumers to process messages received on the same
Perf & Scalability messaging channel to optimize throughput, to improve scalability, availability and
to balance the workload.
Compute Resource Design and
Consolidation Implementation Consolidate multiple tasks or operations into a single computational unit to
increase compute resource utilization and reduce the costs.
Command and Query Data Management
Responsibility Segregation / Design and Segregate operations that read data from operations that update data by using
(CQRS) Implementation / separate interfaces to maximize performance, scalability, and security for higher
Perf & Scalability flexibility.
Event Sourcing
Data Management Append-only store to record the full series of events rather than storing the
/ Perf & Scalability current state; To simplify tasks in complex domains by avoiding the requirement
to synchronize the data model and the business domain; improve performance,
scalability and responsiveness; provide consistency for transactional data; and
maintain full audit trails and history that may enable compensating actions.
External Configuration Store Design and
Implementation / Move configuration information out of the application deployment package to a
Management & centralized location; opportunities for easier management and control of
Monitoring configuration data and for sharing configuration data across applications and
instances.
Federated Identity Security
Delegate authentication to an external identity provider. To simplify development,
minimize the requirement for user administration and improve the user
experience of the application.
Gatekeeper Security
Protect applications and services by using a dedicated host instance that acts as
a broker between clients and the application or service, validates and sanitizes
requests, and passes requests and data between them. This pattern can provide
an additional layer of security and limit the attack surface of the system.
Health Endpoint Monitoring Design and
Implementation / Implement functional checks within an application that external tools can access
through exposed endpoints at regular intervals. This pattern can help to verify
that applications and services are performing correctly.
Index Table
Data Management Create indexes over the fields in data stores that are frequently referenced by
/ query criteria. This pattern can improve query performance by allowing
Perf & Scalability applications to more quickly retrieve data from a data store.
Leader Election
Design and Coordinate the actions performed by a collection of collaborating task instances
Implementation / in a distributed application by electing one instance as the leader that assumes
Resiliency responsibility for managing the other instances. This pattern can help to ensure
that tasks do not conflict with each other,
cause contention for shared resources, or inadvertently interfere with
the work that other task instances are performing.

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 Cloud Design Patterns
Materialized View Data Management
/ Perf & Scalability Prepopulated views over the data in one or more data stores when the data is
formatted in a way that does not favor the required query operations. This pattern
can help to support efficient querying and data extraction and improve application
performance.
Pipes and Filters Design and Decompose a task that performs complex processing into a series of discrete
Implementation / elements that can be reused. This pattern can improve performance, scalability
Messaging and reusability by allowing task elements that perform the processing to be
deployed and scaled independently.
Priority Queue Messaging /
Perf & Scalability Prioritize requests sent to services so that requests with a higher priority are
received and processed more quickly than those of a lower priority.
This pattern is useful in applications that offer different service level guarantees to
individual types of clients.
Queue-based Load Leveling Availability /
Messaging / Use a queue that acts as a buffer between a task and a service that it invokes to
Perf & Scalability smooth intermittent heavy loads that may otherwise cause the service to fail or
the task to timeout. This pattern can help to minimize the impact of peaks in
demand on availability and responsiveness for both the task and the service.
Retry Resiliency
Enable an application to handle temporary failures when connecting to
a service or network resource by transparently retrying the operation in
the expectation that the failure is transient. This pattern can improve the
stability of the application.
Runtime Reconfiguration Design and
Implementation / Design an application so that it can be reconfigured without requiring
Management & redeployment or restarting the application. This helps to maintain availability and
Monitoring minimize downtime.

Scheduler Agent Supervisor Messaging

/ Resiliency Coordinate a set of actions across a distributed set of services and other remote
resources, attempt to transparently handle faults if any of these actions fail or
undo the effects of the work performed if the system cannot recover from a fault.
This pattern can add resiliency to a distributed system by enabling it to recover
and retry actions that fail due to transient exceptions, long-lasting faults, and
process failures.
Sharding Data Management
/ Divide a data store into a set of horizontal partitions shards. This pattern
Perf & Scalability can improve scalability when storing and accessing large volumes of data.
Static Content Hosting Data Management
/ Design and Deploy static content to a cloud-based storage service that can deliver these
Implementation directly to the client. This pattern can reduce the requirement for potentially
/ Perf & Scalability expensive compute instances.
Throttling
Availability / Control the consumption of resources used by an instance of an application, an
Perf & Scalability individual tenant, or an entire service. This pattern can allow the system to
continue to function and meet service level agreements, even when an increase
in demand places an extreme load on resources.
Valet Key Data Management
/ Security Use a token or key that provides clients with restricted direct access to a specific
resource or service to offload data transfer operations from the application code.
This pattern is particularly useful in applications that use cloud-hosted storage
systems or queues and can minimize cost and maximize scalability and
performance.

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