Future facing cloud is here to stay and Amazon is currently at the pinnacle of cloud computing. AWS, Amazon Web Services provides a menu of pre-packaged computing services. Cloud computing, moreover AWS provides foundational services ripe for the replacement of on-premise datacenters. Since cloud providers can take advantage through the economies of scale leveraging commodity hardware to feed their infrastructure, this is the future of computing.
The landscape is also changing for the application architect. The traditional perspective taken from an application architect had key focuses on compute, storage and networking. These were all provisioned out of resources that took a high degree of planning. The architect served as a key resource for facilitating these types of decisions and in turn through their designs making the case. Adding onto the toolkit of the architect, the cloud introduces fungible software based infrastructure replacing compute, storage and networking. Additionally, the toolkit grows with additional simple services strung together making complex orchestrations and workflows.
Additionally adding to the toolbox of the application architect are new and old programmatic paradigms that were difficult to maintain and utilize until the popularization of the cloud. Moving away from the integration paradigm of SOA, we look towards microservices, RESTFull APIs, containers and serverless computing. All of these patterns existed for use by the architect in past iterations but cloud specific capabilities like autoscaling provide new paradigms to take advantage. Additionally, capabilities like infrastructure on demand and a perspective of design for failure allow for more trial and error, consequently deep planning around the infrastructure is no longer needed. In the grand scheme of things, these advances help the architect leverage a new toolkit for integration and allow for rapid development. One major challenge that the architect will face is to be able to articulate the new paradigms to business supporters. Views: 0
Hi Michael,
I too wrote about Microservice architecture vs. monolithic architecture. As somebody with minimal experience in this arena, I had to do a lot of outside reading to get a grasp on several of the terms used throughout this lesson. I was quite interested in PaaS and microservices, as well as why the rise is PaaS is currently slow. Apparently this isn't an easy transition for enterprises that have come to rely on a monolithic architecture, which gives start-up companies and advantage with being able to start with PaaS from scratch. Thanks for sharing!–Nate