This post is a synopsis of the best practices suggested by the market leaders. It serves as a basic guidelines cloud architects should keep in mind while developing applications.

Design for failure:

Imagine every possible scenario that the application can fail. Create failsafe’s for each situation.

Decouple each of the components:

Make the entire application a loosely coupled architecture, failure of one component should not affect the other

Implement Elasticity:

Can be done in three ways

• Depending on time
• Depending on event
• Auto scaling on requirement

-> Elasticity must be automated; all components required for scaling must be automated in the initial stages of creating the components

->Bootstrap instances; all the instances must be bootstrapped to their basic roles,

ex: app server ,database server

All these bootstrapped instances must connect to each other when the application is run, depending on the requirement each of these instances can be scaled separately

Scale Parallel:

Cloud is designed to handle massive parallel operations. To achieve max output and performance, we should leverage these parallelization capabilities.

It is best if we distribute the incoming requests for the cloud application to achieve maximum performance

Mixing and matching scalability and parallelization, performance can be improved.

Keep dynamic data near the application and the static data near the user:

Keep the data which has to be computed dynamically in the cloud the number of requests to the client side decreases. Keep the static data that does not wary much at the client, the number of calls for this redundant data reduces latency.

Security:

Keep the data in transit encrypted using SSL

Keep the static data, Isolated and Encrypted

Secure you application by maintaining multiple security groups

Backup:

Update you application regularly and back them up when done. Take backups of your application regularly.

Ref: Amazon web Services