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SKILL.md

Cloud Design Patterns

Architects design workloads by integrating platform services, functionality, and code to meet both functional and nonfunctional requirements. To design effective workloads, you must understand these requirements and select topologies and methodologies that address the challenges of your workload's constraints. Cloud design patterns provide solutions to many common challenges.

System design heavily relies on established design patterns. You can design infrastructure, code, and distributed systems by using a combination of these patterns. These patterns are crucial for building reliable, highly secure, cost-optimized, operationally efficient, and high-performing applications in the cloud.

The following cloud design patterns are technology-agnostic, which makes them suitable for any distributed system. You can apply these patterns across Azure, other cloud platforms, on-premises setups, and hybrid environments.

How Cloud Design Patterns Enhance the Design Process

Cloud workloads are vulnerable to the fallacies of distributed computing, which are common but incorrect assumptions about how distributed systems operate. Examples of these fallacies include:

  • The network is reliable.
  • Latency is zero.
  • Bandwidth is infinite.
  • The network is secure.
  • Topology doesn't change.
  • There's one administrator.
  • Component versioning is simple.
  • Observability implementation can be delayed.

These misconceptions can result in flawed workload designs. Design patterns don't eliminate these misconceptions but help raise awareness, provide compensation strategies, and provide mitigations. Each cloud design pattern has trade-offs. Focus on why you should choose a specific pattern instead of how to implement it.


References

ReferenceWhen to load

Reliability & Resilience Patterns

Ambassador, Bulkhead, Circuit Breaker, Compensating Transaction, Retry, Health Endpoint Monitoring, Leader Election, Saga, Sequential Convoy

Performance Patterns

Async Request-Reply, Cache-Aside, CQRS, Index Table, Materialized View, Priority Queue, Queue-Based Load Leveling, Rate Limiting, Sharding, Throttling

Messaging & Integration Patterns

Choreography, Claim Check, Competing Consumers, Messaging Bridge, Pipes and Filters, Publisher-Subscriber, Scheduler Agent Supervisor

Architecture & Design Patterns

Anti-Corruption Layer, Backends for Frontends, Gateway Aggregation/Offloading/Routing, Sidecar, Strangler Fig

Deployment & Operational Patterns

Compute Resource Consolidation, Deployment Stamps, External Configuration Store, Geode, Static Content Hosting

Security Patterns

Federated Identity, Quarantine, Valet Key

Event-Driven Architecture Patterns

Event Sourcing

Best Practices & Pattern Selection

Selecting appropriate patterns, Well-Architected Framework alignment, documentation, monitoring

Azure Service Mappings

Common Azure services for each pattern category


Pattern Categories at a Glance

CategoryPatternsFocus

Reliability & Resilience

9 patterns

Fault tolerance, self-healing, graceful degradation

Performance

10 patterns

Caching, scaling, load management, data optimization

Messaging & Integration

7 patterns

Decoupling, event-driven communication, workflow coordination

Architecture & Design

7 patterns

System boundaries, API gateways, migration strategies

Deployment & Operational

5 patterns

Infrastructure management, geo-distribution, configuration

Security

3 patterns

Identity, access control, content validation

Event-Driven Architecture

1 pattern

Event sourcing and audit trails

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Upstream commitf8c2b3214033a1b6134bce9129b59cc5b0440b66
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License

MIT

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HARDENING.md

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SKILL.md

references/architecture-design.md

references/azure-service-mappings.md

references/best-practices.md

references/deployment-operational.md

references/event-driven.md

references/messaging-integration.md

references/performance.md

references/reliability-resilience.md

references/security.md


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