As an architect, you should have come across terms such as loosely coupled, multitier, service oriented, highly scalable, and so on. These terms are associated with architectural best practices, and you will find them listed in the first couple of pages of any system architecture document. These concepts are generally applicable to all architectures, and the cloud is no exception.
In this chapter, we want to highlight how these are accomplished on the cloud. You will notice that the design principles and best practices for developing application architectures on the cloud, largely remain the same as for on-premise architectures. However, you need to be aware of certain peculiarities specific to the cloud environment, in order to architect scalable, available and secure cloud applications. For example, if you are architecting a web-scale application...