Cloud Application Architecture Patterns

This chapter covers architectural patterns that describe how applications have to be designed to benefit from a cloud environment. Additionally, it is described how applications themselves can be offered as configurable cloud services. Having introduced cloud service models (see Sect. 2.3 on Page 39 in Chap. 2) and cloud deployment types (see Sect. 2.4 on Page 54 in Chap. 2), this chapter describes patterns that architects and developers can use to build cloud-native applications, i.e., applications that display the cloud application properties introduced in Sect. 1.2 on Page 5 in Chap. 1. Following the overview, fundamental application architectural patterns cover the architectural principles found in most cloud-native applications to enable the cloud application properties. Application component patterns then specify patterns on how to design and build individual components of a cloud-native application, so that the overall application can be built on top of an elastic infrastructure (78) or elastic platform (81). Multi-tenancy patterns describe how cloud applications and individual components can be shared by multiple customers, so called tenants, on different levels of the application stack. Cloud integration patterns finally describe mechanisms on how to integrate multiple cloud environments or cloud environments and on-premise datacenters as well as applications both in and outside the cloud.