5 Steps for Building a
Cloud-Ready Application
Architecture
David Linthicum
Here’s how to build a cloud-ready application, and the
application architecture concepts you’ll need to succeed.
Anyone who has built applications understands that applications designed
specifically for the platform on which they’ll run, perform better, and are more
resilient and are easier to manage. Developing for public or private cloud plat-
forms is no exception.
However, few people understand exactly how to go about designing and build-
ing a cloud application architecture for private or public clouds. This lack of
skills and experience has led to poorly designed applications that don’t deliver
the value that enterprises expect.
The process presented here represents a step-by-step approach that combines
traditional software development concepts and reviews what’s new with the
cloud. It is a collection of best practices, concepts, and procedures for success.
1) Design the application as a collection of services
Cloud applications are best deployed as a collection of cloud services, or APIs.
You build up from the data to the services and then combine those services
into composite services or complete composite applications.
This is service-based or service-oriented architecture, at its essence. While
many understand the concepts, developers still have a tendency to create
tightly coupled applications that focus on the user interface, rather than
expose the underlying functions as services they can leverage independently.
When developing an application architecture for the cloud, you deal with complex
distributed systems that can take advantage of loosely coupled applications built
on many services that can also be decoupled from the data. You can separate the
application services physically, executing on the proper machine instances, and
18 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016