Cloud Application Architecture Patterns

Chapter 2. Application Architecture

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 2nd chapter of the final book.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Cloud applications can seem exotic, but their fundamentals evolved from traditional IT. The architectures for applications are largely the same for traditional IT and cloud. Some of what can make cloud applications seem advanced is that they incorporate advanced architectures that are used less commonly in traditional IT.

The three patterns in this chapter embody three broad approaches for how to architect an entire application. These architectures are not specific to the cloud, they apply equally well to both traditional IT and to the cloud. Developers experienced with developing architectures for traditional IT applications may well already be familiar with these patterns.

Introduction to Application Architecture

Before we dive to the architectures, we’ll review some background information that is helpful for understanding them. An application architecture is a kind of software architecture, so first we will define that. Architectures are all about trade-offs, ...