Five Steps to Approach Hybrid Cloud Design Patterns

You are an architect on a large Cloud transformation project. Your vision is to put the standards and architectural patterns you defined into action. Based on your study of the enterprise landscape, you defined the architectural blueprint, principles, standards and have already defined a hybrid landing zone.

Now, for the various application and integration architectures to come to life, it will require a mix of cloud infrastructure as a service and cloud-native services. It requires a base foundation for infrastructures to be built using reusable, standards-based components. How would you do that? While you adopt Infrastructure as code as your architectural principle, how do you shift left and build the foundation for the assembly line? It is like assembling vehicles in an assembly plant with the right specifications, trims & colour. Engineers focus on assembly rather than manufacturing the core components.

You set the stage for your DevSecOps engineering team with Five(5) steps. You Keep It Simple & Straightforward(KISS) and with this you Don’t Repeat Yourself(DRY):

1. Your enterprise landscape drives the Hybrid cloud patterns. You prepare Architectural patterns and prescriptive design patterns. The design patterns include application, integration components. You perform architectural validation against the pillars of Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimization.
2. Next, you define the lowest common denominators for the hybrid cloud patterns. You call them Atomic Patterns. Atomic patterns are classified as Application(AP) patterns, Storage(STG) Patterns Database(DB) Patterns, and Networking(NW) patterns. Few examples of various types of atomic patterns are EC2 instances on AWS, Auto-scaling groups, Database services, Block storage, etc. These are self-contained patterns, so much so that they need to be composed with other patterns to make an application work as an integrated unit.

3. To make the application components work in symphony, you bring together the atomic components. You call them Composite Patterns(CP). They are the level-1 composite patterns that use two or more lego-boxes(atomic patterns) to deliver an infrastructure for the application to work as a whole, as an integrated unit.

4. Next, you create the Grand Composite Patterns(GCP). These patterns compose the level-1 composite patterns. A monolithic application architecture may require to be strangled as it migrates to the cloud. As it undergoes gradual modernization, the transitional state architecture requires a legacy module of the application to be realized with AWS EC2 with AWS RDS MSSQL DB while a key part of the application is unlocked to use AWS ECS Fargate with Aurora MySQL.

5. Lastly, you need the configuration management patterns for the middleware, databases, application/webservers to be ready to be operational.

With this, your DevSecOps engineers are all set to use the pattern library to assemble infrastructure specific to application needs. These patterns expose variables/attributes much like API specs. Variables are configured by the engineers as per the build spec for an application.

I and my team have put this into practice for large-scale cloud transformation programs. Let me know your thoughts on KISS & DRY for realizing your Hybrid Cloud patterns.

In the next part(s), I’ll double-click on the five steps.