As an architect, we are sure you have come across terms such as loosely coupled, multi-tier, services oriented, highly scalable, and many more. These terms are associated with architectural best practices and you 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 approach you take towards cloud application architecture remains the same to a large extent. However, you need to be aware of certain peculiarities of the cloud environment, in order to architect scalable, available, and secure cloud applications. For example, if you are architecting a web-scale application, you need to take into consideration the ability to automatically scale up and down. What are the implications of auto scaling on your...