WHAT WE DO.
We assist companies ensure that the full lifecycle of developing a Cloud strategy, then planning, selection and adoption of the Cloud Platform/Solution is managed successfully – using best-in-class frameworks and best practices for all stakeholders across IT, Business and their internal and external Customers:
- Establishing clear business outcomes – a clearly defined digital roadmap, current, transitional and future state architectures [TOGAF 9.2 artefacts], agile delivery approach [utilising Agile [Scrum/Kanban] methodologies] and associated business case
- Agile Delivery – Support Product Manager in developing agile content and managing backlogs, Leading daily standups, retrospectives, sprint planning and reviews [as Scrum Master]. Monitoring Velocity, whilst removing impediments and helping to identify other risks
- Governance – Establishing steering committees, managing multiple business unit stakeholders and managing risk and reporting processes in complex organisations
- Ready – Ensure the readiness of staff through skills, communication and learning plans.
- Operate – Define a manageable operating model to guide activities during and long after adoption. including:
- Organise: Align people and teams to deliver proper cloud operations and adoption.
- Govern: Align proper governance disciplines to consistently apply cost management, risk mitigation, compliance, and security baselines across all cloud adoption.
- Manage: Ongoing operational management of the IT portfolio to minimize interruptions to business processes and ensure stability of the IT portfolio.
- Support: Align proper partnership and support options.
- Continual Improvement – Use of Strategy Maps and Balanced scorecards to ensure organisations are continually growing
ARCHITECTING SCALABLE and RESILIENT CLOUD SOLUTIONS
Utilising Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) best practices for :
- Centralised Observability supporting log, event, trace and metrics correlation and timely root cause analysis; whilst monitoring latency, traffic, errors, and saturation signals
- Service Level Objective (SLO) — setting relevant SLI, SLO’s and Error budgets
- Graceful Resilience with reduced blast radius – recover gracefully from failures, and they continue to function with minimal downtime and data loss before full recovery. Effective use of key architectural patterns – circuit breaker, timeouts and retries with exponential backoff. Refactoring and isolating legacy applications into microservices.
- Configuring Highly available (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) scenarios and run as designed in a healthy state with no significant downtime.
- Automation — using CI/CD and IaC principles to manage deployment, testing and monitoring
- Frequent Release Management – Implemention of a structured process for deploying and releasing software; Using techniques like canary testing and feature flags to reduce risk.
Understanding how these elements work together — and how they affect cost — is essential to building a reliable cloud application. It can help you determine how much downtime is acceptable, the potential cost to your business, and which functions are necessary during a recover.
Scalability is the ability of a system to handle increased load.
If your application isn’t configured to scale out automatically as load increases, it’s possible that your application’s services will fail if they become saturated with user requests…
Scalability tasks during the architecting phase for example include:
- Partition workloads. Design parts of the process to be discrete and decomposable.Autoscaling:
- Automated scaling based on predefined metrics like CPU utilisation or traffic volume. This optimizes resource usage and avoids manual intervention.
- Serverless computing: Leverage serverless functions for event-driven tasks like processing APIs or triggers. This eliminates server management and scales seamlessly with demand
- Design for scaling. React to variable load by increasing and decreasing the number of instances of roles, queues, and other services. .
- Utilise an event driven microservices architecture:
- Containerisation – Utilize container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes to package your application code and dependencies into portable units that can run on any server.
- Performance Optimisation: Identify and address bottlenecks in your application code and database queries.
- Utilize caching mechanisms to reduce database load and improve response times.
- Implement load balancing strategies to distribute traffic across multiple instances and avoid single points of failure.
- Leverage API gateways – to manage application access and simplify scaling individual microservices.
LATEST
INSIGHT.
Cloud Architecture 101?
This article outlines architectural styles commonly utilised along with some high-level considerations for their use.