Cloud rewards designs that use its properties and punishes designs that ignore them. Before drawing anything, an architect internalises the principles that distinguish a cloud-native design from a rented data centre.
Elasticity and disposability
Capacity added and removed on demand; instances treated as replaceable rather than nursed. Design for horizontal scale and for any component to disappear and be replaced automatically.
Managed services first
Where a managed service meets the requirement, use it and spend engineering effort on what differentiates the business. Take on infrastructure only where control is genuinely required.
Everything as code and everything observable
Infrastructure, configuration and policy defined in code; every component emitting the telemetry needed to operate it. These are prerequisites, not enhancements.
Common pitfall
Lift-and-shift followed by disappointment. Migration is the start of adopting the cloud, not the end.
Action Step
Choose a reference solution to design through this course, a realistic multi-tier application with data and integration needs. Write its requirements, constraints and the cloud principles you will apply, in one page.
This course is vendor-independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or accredited by any tool vendor or certification body, names products only for identification, and issues no credential. Verify current documentation before applying anything in production.