The Value of Principles
A set of Architectural Principles will enable design decisions to be made quickly and with confidence.
Define your principles after you have clearly understood why a move to the cloud is desirable. Objectives will usually focus on realising new capabilities that will deliver business benefits. These may include cost reduction, speed of innovation, future-proofing platforms and improved resilience.
Future architectural designs should then adhere to the set of decided upon Architectural Principles. In doing so, we can be confident that each solution supports the broader cloud migration objectives. Architectural principles also enable the design of solutions that are standardised, consistent and measurably effective.
Important:
Designing without architectural principles in place will result in solutions being architected on an individual basis. Such an approach can result in complex and expensive deployments that do not align with your strategic objectives.
Complexity is the enemy of a successful cloud strategy.
Just as for on-premises, complexity will ultimately make the cloud landscape inflexible, fragile and operationally expensive.
What Makes a Good Architectural Principle?
An excellent architectural principle should be simple, validated and confident in its message.
It is vital that the reasons for adopting the principle, and the benefits it can bring, are clearly articulated and well understood.
For any given principle to be effective, it is also essential to know what prerequisites need to be in place.
Example Architectural Principles
Whatever architectural principles are adopted, they should be specific to each organisations cloud objectives.
There may already be a set of architectural principles in place for on-premises solutions. These are a good starting point. There will likely need to be additional principles identified to realise specific cloud benefits.
The examples in the following pages may help define a set of architectural principles in your organisation.