Re-Architecting Application for Cloud: An Architect's reference guide

Re-Architecting Application for Cloud

An Architect’s reference guide

__________

Ashutosh Shashi

Re-Architecting application for cloud

Copyright © 2020 by Ashutosh Shashi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

ISBN 978-1-7352222-1-9

for Neha, my wonderful wife.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Introduction

Cloudification

Digital Transformation

Microservice Architecture

Serverless Solutions

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Solutions

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Solutions

Managed Kubernetes Solutions

Database Solutions

About the Author

Ashutosh Shashi is a visionary and innovative technologist, currently living in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He has completed master’s degree in Computer Applications. He has more than 15 years of experience in IT industry.

He is TOGAF 9.1 Certified, Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect, Microsoft Certified AZURE Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, Project Management Professional (PMP), DataStax Certified Professional on Apache Cassandra, and Oracle Certified Java SE 8 programmer.

One can define him as a deep reader, dedicated writer and technology passionate person. He loves to keep himself updated with the latest stack of technologies and industry standards.

Introduction

This is a reference book for Architects. This book can be helpful for those developers who wants to increase breadth of knowledge about tools and technology. If you are planning for career advancement and you are interviewing for cloud architect, this book can also be used for interview preparation purpose. You can go through this book before your interview every time, so that you will remember all the concepts before interview.

As the technology is evolving very fast, new tools and technologies are coming every day. This book covers fundamental of architecting or re-architecting of the application. This book also makes you aware and provides details about tools and technology available in cloud. This book does not over explain any concepts, keeping in mind that you can complete your reading in less time. With this book, you will get lot of information in less reading time.

1

Cloudification

There could be n number of reasons behind the decision to move any application or product to the cloud. Below are the most common reason or factor to rearchitect and migrate the application to the cloud.

Business agility

Global reach

Data analytics

Scale to meet on demand

Cost

Technology

Safety

Business Agility:

Business agility provides organization the capability to response to the changes in business environment rapidly and cost effectively. Business agility derive IT agility in any organization, and IT agility derive business agility vice-versa.

Architect should work with businesspeople and users to smartly identify the products which requires change to derive business agility. If you have a product that is dealing with critical market research, how that product will respond with changing market condition.

Sometimes it is absolute necessary to re-architect the application and move application in cloud environment. You decided to re-architect application because the technology used in current application is absolute and any modification in application is becoming very difficult. You decided to re-architect because the third party software that is being used in application is no longer available or no longer supports and you got trapped with that third-party software that is not allowing to enhance your application and you need to end that dependency to develop the capability yourself. You decided to re-architect because your application is not sustaining the increased load because of increase in business and you need to have autoscaling in place, now you are planning to get the feature of cloud computing to scale out and scale in your application automatically. You decided to re-architect because your application needs to support mobile and handheld device that it is not supporting right now, and the application should be available all the time.

To improve agility while moving to the cloud you must re-architect the existing applications, lift and shift or near to lift and shift with little modification in application and application configuration usually do not provide business agility and you will be only able to migrate your application to the cloud with no other advantage.

Global Reach:

If your business is increasing its footprints from local customers to global customer, your application should be accessible from customer base in low latency and you need to have your application and data center in more than one region near to your customer base. To comply with the regulations, you may need to separate the customer data based on the boundary of state or country and store the customers data into their state or country.

To achieve this, you need to re-architect your application and migrate your application to the cloud.

Data Analytics:

Data analytics and market research is becoming the key to the business growth. Every organization is doing data analytics and market research to explore the market condition, to explore the customer need and customer behavior. If your do not have the existing system for data analytics and market research, or if you have system for data analytics that is not fulfilling the purpose in the more competitive market condition and you want to modernize your current data analytics application. You need to understand the data analytics requirements and re-architect your application and move to cloud to get existing data analytics capability from cloud provider and save your time for development and business plan.

Scale to meet on demand:

Scalability of applications needed to perform well in increasing workload situation. Your application is getting popular day-by-day, and the application that is deployed currently on your data center does not support auto scaling. Your operation team is calculating load almost daily and increasing the server capacity or increasing the servers with the load balancer. You do not want to keep calculating the server load on daily basis and keep increasing the server manually. You need to re-architect your application and move to cloud so that you will get auto-scaling capability.

Cost:

Cost is major factor which enforce organization to re-architecting their application for the cloud. Moving your application to the cloud may not be cost saver for you, you may end up paying more than what you are paying right now. But if you calculate business gain, consider reduced operational expenses, and market reach, then you will realize the benefit of re-architecting your application and moving to the cloud.

Technology:

Technology advancement is a very impartment factor to re-architecting application for the cloud. If you have legacy application with old technology, it is very hard to find good resource, also it is very difficult to do the enhancement or doing any bug fixing in that application. Re-architecting the application using latest technologies and moving to the cloud will provide you flexibility to try out latest technologies to modernize your application over the time.

Safety:

Re-architecting and moving your application to the cloud will allow you to keep your application updated to follow latest security standards. You will be able to keep updating your application with changes in latest governance guideline for application security.

Re-Architecture Decision:

You have a legacy application having many components and using many legacy technologies. Based on organization initiative and business needs you have selected this application for re-architecting for the cloud.

To re-architect, first you have to understand the business and business needs that is being solved by existing application. How many other applications is dependent on this application and how to solve those dependency so that dependent applications should not be impacted. Sometimes you need to understand how those applications are impacting your application and what data and services those applications are sharing with your application and for what purpose. Sometimes you don’t know if any application is dependent on your application. For example, your application is storing data in multiple databases, multiple tables and datasets, and some other application is generating report out of stored data that is being stored by your application, or some application may be considering that data for some analytics and research. It is required to understand what is the use of data that is being produced by your application. Create a spreadsheet and list down all the dependent application and how it is dependent on the current application so that when you re-architect your application you should understand the impact of changing service, changing any contract, or changing