10 design principles for cloud applications

Abdelrahman Elayashy
2 min readAug 31, 2022

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Follow these design principles to make your application more scalable, resilient, and manageable.

  • Design for self healing. In a distributed system, failures happen. Design your application to be self healing when failures occur.
  • Make all things redundant. Build redundancy into your application, to avoid having single points of failure.
  • Minimize coordination. Minimize coordination between application services to achieve scalability.
  • Design to scale out. Design your application so that it can scale horizontally, adding or removing new instances as demand requires.
  • Partition around limits. Use partitioning to work around database, network, and compute limits.
  • Design for operations. Design your application so that the operations team has the tools they need.
  • Use managed services. When possible, use platform as a service (PaaS) rather than infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
  • Use an identity service. Use an identity as a service (IDaaS) platform instead of building or operating your own.
  • Use the best data store for the job. Pick the storage technology that is the best fit for your data and how it will be used.
  • Design for evolution. All successful applications change over time. An evolutionary design is key for continuous innovation.
  • Build for the needs of business. Every design decision must be justified by a business requirement.

[source]:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/design-principles/

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Abdelrahman Elayashy

I am Cloud Engineer @Bosch && M. Sc. Computer Science @KIT