Cloud Native Architecture Patterns & Katas Workshop

As a software architect, confronting the cloud can feel quite daunting. We are confronted with an onslaught of public cloud providers; which one should we choose? Are we ready for public cloud? Or do we need to focus on private cloud? And what does that even mean? Or are we looking for a hybrid solution? And these questions are only the beginning. Soon we’ll be looking at IaaS vs. PaaS. Containers vs. Unikernels. Servers vs. Serverless! Is there any way to make sense of all of the choices and cut through all of the hype?

Fortunately there is a way forward. There are clear architectural concepts and patterns that we can use as guideposts on our journey to the cloud. In this full-day workshop, we’ll gain an understanding of the unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure and how we can design and develop application architectures that fully exploit those unique characteristics. These “cloud native” architectures compose simple patterns with predictable performance, scaling, security and failure characteristics to create solutions to complex problems that can be quickly, flexibly, and continuously evolved to take advantage of new information. In many ways these architectures have more in common with organic systems than anything we’ve previously called software.

These characteristics of cloud native architectures allow us to practice an extreme flavor of continuous delivery that allows us to survive a new marketplace where speed is our primary competitive advantage and access to consumer services must be ubiquitous.

The newly trained cloud architect will leave this workshop equipped with an understanding of:

• unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure
• architecture concepts unique to cloud native
• significant tradeoffs involved in cloud architecture
• the concept of continuous partial failure and how it affects architecture
• the importance of composability to cloud architectures
• how continuous delivery, devops, and microservices relate to cloud

You’ll also leave with a rich catalog of cloud native architecture patterns that you should be able to apply regardless of your choice of cloud provider or technology stack. We'll enhance our understanding of these topics by alternating between a traditional lecture setting and breaking up into groups to do kata exercises.