Tag architecture

Multi-Region AWS Architectures

Running an application in multiple availability zones (data centers) in a single region is a best practice when architecting on AWS. Interested in learning more about multi-AZ? Take a look at our previous post here. Depending on your availability or lat...

Calculate AWS Costs in Detail

Calculating AWS costs upfront is a challenge. To get accurate numbers, you have to understand the pricing model of the used AWS services. A pricing model consists of one or many pricing dimensions. E.g., GBs stored, number of requests, etc. Keep in mind...

What Architects Need to Know About Networking on AWS

As an architect, you may not have thought too much about the network management before. At least that’s how it used to be for me. But since I’ve been designing architectures for AWS, network structure has become much more important to me. With Amazon V...

How to Become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect

In 2012, I created my first AWS account. Back then, I worked as a software engineer and was looking for a way to deploy an online trading platform. Two years later, I attended re:Invent — the yearly conference organized by AWS — in Las Vegas for the fir...

What's the CO² footprint of your architecture?

Fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our days. When designing an architecture, there are many important factors to consider: security, reliability, performance and costs. I’d like to add another factor to that list: the CO² footpr...

Unusual AWS Architectures

AWS provides many building blocks. As architects, we have to choose the right building blocks to construct our systems. But sometimes, the proper building block is not available, and we have to make compromises. In this blog post, I show four unusual AW...

Caching on AWS 101

Oftentimes, the idea of adding a caching layer arises when users start complaining about the performance of an application. Adding a cache to your architecture does not solve all problems — especially when implementing that change under pressure to fix ...

10 Obstacles for Lift & Shift Architectures

The cloud is not only about greenfield projects. Over the last few years I have accompanied several enterprises in large migration projects from on-premises to the Amazon Web Services (AWS). This blog post gives an overview of typical obstacles for lift...

Resilient event-driven Serverless architectures: Isolate your dependencies

Most systems grow over time. Dependencies are added, and availability suffers. How can we design an event-driven serverless architecture that stays resilient if we add dependencies? In this blog post, I walk you through a real-world application that iso...

Building with EC2: 10 Tips for the Successful Cloud Architect

Despite the Kubernetes and Serverless hypes, the vast majority of cloud workloads still happen on virtual machines. AWS offers the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, where you can launch virtual machines (AWS calls them instances). The EC2 serv...