Deciding on the Best Cloud-Based Solution

When designing your application to make it cloud-based, you must understand different architectural designs – from the simplest to the most sophisticated. In fact, cloud technology not only enables cost optimization but also significantly reduces the time it takes to launch your solution to the market. Also, it effectively enhances your application’s ability to tolerate faults and scale. However, optimizing for cost, speed, resilience, and scalability often involves trade-offs in terms of constraints and flexibility, so you must choose the right compromise for your needs.

This chapter discusses different software architecture models and teaches you how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the cloud in your solutions. This chapter will also discuss the different types of cloud service that we can consider while developing our infrastructure, what the ideal scenarios are, and where we can use each of them.

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Technical requirements

For the practical content in this chapter, you must create or use an Azure account. We can find the detailed procedure for creating an Azure account in Chapter 1, Understanding the Importance of Software Architecture, in the Creating an Azure account section.

Different software deployment models

Let’s begin our exploration with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the foundational layer of cloud computing. IaaS offers a flexible and scalable infrastructure, which is crucial for businesses with specific hardware requirements or those transitioning from on-premises solutions to the cloud.

In companies where you have infrastructure engineers, you will probably find more people working with IaaS. On the other hand, in companies where IT is not the core business, you will find a bunch of Software as a Service (SaaS) systems. It is common for developers to decide to use the Platform as a Service (PaaS) option or to go serverless, as they have no need to deliver infrastructures in this scenario.

As a software architect, you must cope with this environment and be sure that you are optimizing the cost and work factors, not only during the initial development of the solution but also during its maintenance. Also, as an architect, you...

Why are hybrid applications so useful in many cases?

In its general meaning, the word hybrid means something whose parts do not share a uniform architectural choice; each part makes a different architectural choice. However, in the case of cloud solutions, the word hybrid refers mainly to solutions that mix cloud subsystems with on-premises subsystems. However, it can also refer to mixing web subsystems with device-specific subsystems, such as mobiles or any other device that runs code.

Due to the number of services Azure can provide and the number of design architectures that can be implemented, hybrid applications are probably the best answer to the main question addressed in this chapter: how to use the opportunities offered by the cloud in your projects.

Nowadays, many current projects are moving from an on-premises solution to a cloud architecture, and depending on where you are going to deliver these projects, you will still find many bad preconceptions regarding moving...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to take advantage of the services offered by the cloud in your solutions, as well as the various options you can choose from.

This chapter covered different ways to deliver the same application in a cloud-based structure. We also noted how rapidly Microsoft is delivering all these options to its customers, as you can experience all of these options in actual applications and choose the one that best fits your needs, since there is no silver bullet that works in all situations. As a software architect, you need to analyze your environment and your team, and then decide on the best cloud architecture to implement in your solution.

The next chapter is dedicated to building a flexible architecture comprising small, scalable software modules called microservices.

Questions

1. Why should you use IaaS in your solution?
2. Why should you use PaaS in your solution?
3. Why should you use SaaS in your solution?
4. Why should you use serverless in your solution?
5. What is the advantage of using an Azure SQL Server database?
6. How can you accelerate AI in your application with Azure?
7. How can hybrid architectures help you to design a better solution?

Further reading

You can check out these web links to study the topics covered in this chapter in greater depth:

• https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/xamarin/
• https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/xamarin-cross-platform-application-development
• https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/learning-azure-functions
• https://azure.microsoft.com/overview/what-is-iaas/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/azure-security-iaas
• https://azure.microsoft.com/services/app-service/web/
• https://azure.microsoft.com/services/sql-database/
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/data-science-virtual-machines/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/sql-database/sql-database-automatic-tuning
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/
• https://powerbi.microsoft.com/
• https://office.com
• https://azure.microsoft...