#aws-architecture | AWS Cloud Architecture (1)

Architecting on AWS is like putting together building blocks. Learn about the possibilities and how to combine multiple AWS services.

AWS Architect Mindset

Architecting applications on AWS is challenging. On the one hand, you need a broad understanding of AWS services. On the other hand, you have to know the details as well. In this blog post, I outline the mindset you need to build on AWS successfully. ...

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...

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...

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...

Containers vs. Serverless: Thoughts About Your Cloud Strategy

There are many ways to build on AWS. When shaping the strategy for your organization, the following two options should be on your shortlist. Containers: Package your source code into containers and leverage AWS’s fully-managed services, providing the c...

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 ...

How to sell pay per use SaaS to AWS customers in the AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace allows you to sell software to AWS customers. The customer can either run the software on its own (using AMIs and optional CloudFormation), or you can offer the software as a service (SaaS). You can also offer containers and machine lear...

A brief history of AWS architectures

The way you create architectures on AWS has evolved over the last ten years. In this blog post, I demonstrate what is better today than ten years before. 2009 In 2009, a typical architecture on AWS used the following components: Classic Load Balancer ...

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

Are you offering availability of 99.99% or more to your clients? Bad news, you might not be able to keep your promise! Recently AWS announced a bunch of new Service Level Agreements (SLA). Therefore, it is now possible to calculate the expected availabi...

My mental model of AWS

AWS is a complex system that no one can understand end-to-end? As AWS professionals we still have to deal with the AWS system daily. We design for AWS, and we debug our applications running in AWS. How can we deal with a system that is too complex to un...