Understanding cloud applications design principles
In this section, we will cover key guiding principles that are useful while designing cloud-based applications. More specifically, we will introduce designing for scale, automated infrastructure, failures, parallel processing, performance, and eventual consistency.
Designing for scale
Traditionally, designing for scale meant carefully sizing your infrastructure for peak usage and then adding a factor to handle variability in load. At some point, when you reached a certain threshold on CPU, memory, disk (capacity and throughput) or network bandwidth, you would repeat the exercise for handling increased loads and initiate a lengthy procurement and provisioning process. Depending on the application, this could mean a scale up (vertical scaling) with bigger machines or scale out (horizontal scaling) with more machines being deployed. Once deployed, the new capacity would be fixed (and run continuously) whether the additional capacity was being...
