Welcome to cloud-architecture.io, a free resource about good development and architectural practices for cloud. You can edit this page, and anything else on this site, it’s all hosted as markdown on github.
What is Cloud
Cloud Computing is:
the on-demand delivery of compute power, storage, databases, applications, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other IT resources over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
The term “Cloud” is generally used to encompass this technology, ecosystem of platforms and tools as well as ways-of-working and architectural approaches that make the best use of cloud technology.
Cloud Computing offers a range of benefits for organisations, teams and individuals.
Why is Cloud Architecture different?
Many traditional approaches to working with IT around requirements, architecture, planning and testing have been focussed on reducing the cost of failed experiments. Iterative processes, including agile processes, took this a step further by making risk reduction emprical rather than plan-based.
With cloud, the cost of failed experiments is significantly lower than traditional IT because once you’ve finished an experiment you can simply release the resources. Once we would have to buy a $20M server cluster to test our architectural ideas, now we can rent them for a few minutes for a handful of dollars and no sunk cost.
Traditional methods of risk reduction, such as detailed architectural analysis, requirements management etc. can actually take more time, and cost more to do, than to simply try an idea with cloud. This leads to a different set of architectural practices and approaches.
So why this site?
This site is for people who want to explore those differences in architectural approaches and learn about cloud.
Since cloud is a mix of software engineering, infrastructure engineering and security engineering a lot of people are coming to cloud architecure from a mix of different backgrounds. That merging of skills means that there’s a lot of assumed knowledge that sometimes people just don’t know yet.
This site, is for sharing that knowledge and is split into 4 sections:
Did you say free?
Yes, this site is free, there are no tools to buy or licenses to pay.
Edit this page