Pricey Architecture
Or, How architecting in the cloud is different When designing cloud scale always on system, system architects are expected to be experienced in core system requirements - scale, security and high availability. By this day and age, this art is pretty well understood. The public cloud is a great help in driving solutions to those core concerns by providing the hard-to-acquire and hard-to-build foundational elements: Apparently infinite amount of compute and storage capacity for scale Fine grained control at the network and API level for security Fault zone isolation in the form of independent zones and regions for HA However, the tax the cloud imposes on these building blocks, even if not apparent at first, is its own complexity. If you don't consider the pricing models for the underlying building blocks and misapply them the tax is converted to $'s. Here are a few examples from recent design mishaps I've witnessed. An expensive scaling story: What with a...