Chapter 5. Designing and architecting for cloud scale
This chapter covers
- Dealing with internet scale through the use of database sharding
- Connecting a data center to the cloud
- Expanding to the cloud through cloudbursting
- Handling exponentially expanding storage through the use of cloud storage
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to design and architect applications that can handle the potentially massive scale possible when you’re using the cloud and are exposed to the entire internet. You’re now prepared for an in-depth discussion of designing and architecting applications specifically for the cloud. This is important because you may have applications that scale to large numbers of users—a number so large that we call it cloud scale. Although this chapter doesn’t require a programmer’s background, we do go into some detail about issues that are unique to building applications that are designed for the cloud and prepared for broad-scale use. After all, one of the primary reasons for utilizing the cloud is to be prepared for, and to have an affordable economic model for, that wonderful “problem” of suddenly having too many users.