Tag architecture

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...

Top 14 Must-Haves for Your AWS Architecture Checklist

After analyzing the requirements of your application, you came up with an AWS architecture. Good job! This blog post contains a checklist helping you to validate your architecture. Make sure that you haven’t forgotten any important aspects. This is a ...

What's the best AWS Compute option for your project?

There are many good reasons why you should move to the cloud and AWS in particular. Benefit from the latest innovations or consume sophisticated technology as a commodity (relational databases, Hadoop clusters, data warehouses, …) to lower your time to ...