What is “Cloud Scale” and why does it matter?

Cloud scale means not treating the cloud as another remote data center. It’s moving from just hosting applications in the cloud — to designing applications and engineering the underlying infrastructure to embrace elasticity and scalability. There are limited cost savings and performance benefits unless these capabilities are built inherently into the infrastructure.

According to Wes Coffay, Technical Lead of STS’s Innovation Hub, there are 3 design principles critical to achieving Cloud Scale.

Provisioning/Autoscaling: Building and scaling your infrastructure automatically is critical to maximizing impact in the cloud. By automating building and scaling, you can meet changing demand (faster load times, fewer outages), manage costs by not paying for resources you’re not using, and reduce operations overhead (your engineers should be focused on building new features, not creating new servers).

Dynamic/Software-defined Networking: Dynamic/Software-defined Networking: As your deployment pipelines and autoscaling add and remove servers and resources quickly, you need to ensure that your networking can adjust. With the new servers handling traffic, you will reduce network-related outages and improve app performance ASAP!

Rapid Prototyping: Use Canary Deployments and A/B Testing to introduce new features in front of your users quickly and then iterate rapidly based on user feedback and performance monitoring. Improve your Agile process and get tighter feedback cycles!

Discover how we’ve helped government agencies use IaC and open-source serverless architecture to meet their goals. Read our Government IT Executive's Guide to Achieving Cloud Scale or schedule a meeting with us to see how we can help your organization.