At Ottawa .NET User Group I had a talk on Cloud Design Patterns, External Config Pattern, Cache Aside, Federated Identity Pattern, Valet Key Pattern, Gatekeeper Pattern and the Circuit Breaker Pattern. These patterns depicts common problems in designing cloud-hosted applications and design patterns that offer guidance.

1. TaswarBhatti

2. Agenda
• What are Patterns?
• The External Configuration Pattern
• The Cache Aside Pattern
• The Federated Identity Pattern
• The Valet Key Pattern
• The Gatekeeper Pattern
• The Circuit Breaker Pattern
• Questions

3. What are Patterns?
• General reusable solution to a recurring problem
• A template on how to solve a problem
• Best practices
• Patterns allow developers communicate with each other in well
known and understand names for software interactions.

4. External Configuration Pattern

5. External Configuration Pattern
• Helps move configuration information out of the application
deployment
• This pattern can provide for easier management and control of
configuration data
• For sharing configuration data across applications and other
application instances

6. Typical Application

7. Storing Configuration in file

8. Multiple application

9. Problems
• Configuration becomes part of deployment
• Multiple applications share the same configuration
• Hard to have access control over the configuration

11. External Configuration Pattern

12. When to use the pattern
• When you have shared configuration, multiple application
• You want to manage configuration centrally by DevOps
• Provide audit for each configuration

13. When not to use
• When you only have a single application there is no need to use
this pattern it will make things more complex

14. Cloud Solution Offerings
• Azure Key Vault
• Vault by Hashicorp
• AWS KMS
• Keywhiz

15. Cache Aside Pattern

16. Cache Aside Pattern
• Load data on demand into a cache from datastore
• Helps improve performance
• Helps in maintain consistency between data held in the cache
and data in the underlying data store.

17. Typical Application

18. Cache Aside Pattern

19. When to use the pattern
• Resource demand is unpredictable.
• This pattern enables applications to load data on demand
• It makes no assumptions about which data an application will
require in advance

20. When not to use
• Don’t use it for data that changes very often

21. Things to consider
• Sometimes data can be changed from outside process
• Have an expiry for the data in cache
• When update of data, invalidate the cache before updating the
data in database
• Pre populate the data if possible

22. Cloud Offerings
• Redis (Azure and AWS)
• Memcache
• Hazelcast
• Elastic Cache (AWS)

23. Federated Identity Pattern

24. Federated Identity Pattern
• Delegate authentication to an external identity provider.
• Simplify development, minimize the requirement for user
administration
• Improve the user experience of the application
• Centralized providing MFA for user authentication

25. Typical Application

26. Problem

27. Problem
• Complex development and maintenance (Duplicated code)
• MFA is not an easy thing
• User administration is a pain with access control
• Hard to keep system secure
• No single sign on (SSO) everyone needs to login again to
different systems

28. Federated Identity Pattern

29. When to use
• When you have multiple applications and want to provide SSO
for applications
• Federated identity with multiple partners
• Federated identity in SAAS application

30. When not to use it
• You already have a single application and have custom code
that allows you to login

31. Things to consider
• The identity Server needs to be highly available
• Single point of failure, must have HA
• RBAC, identity server usually does not have authorization
information
• Claims and scope within the security auth token

32. Cloud Offerings
• Azure AD
• Gemalto STA and SAS
• Amazon IAM
• GCP Cloud IAM

33. Valet Key Pattern

34. Valet Key Pattern
• Use a token that provides clients with restricted direct access to
a specific resource
• Provide offload data transfer from the application
• Minimize cost and maximize scalability and performance

35. Typical Application

36. Problem

37. Valet Key Pattern

38. When to use it
• The application has limited resources
• To minimize operational cost
• Many interaction with external resources (upload, download)
• When the data is stored in a remote data store or a different
datacenter

39. When not to use it
• When you need to transform the data before upload or
download

40. Cloud Offerings
• Azure Blob Storage
• Amazon S3
• GCP Cloud Storage

41. Gatekeeper Pattern

42. Gatekeeper Pattern
• Using a dedicated host instance that acts as a broker between
clients and services
• Protect applications and services
• Validates and sanitizes requests, and passes requests and data
between them
• Provide an additional layer of security, and limit the attack
surface of the system

43. Typical Application

45. Problem

46. Gatekeeper Pattern

47. When to use it
• Sensitive information (Health care, Authentication)
• Distributed System where perform request validation separately

48. When not to use
• Performance vs security

49. Things to consider
• WAF should not hold any keys or sensitive information
• Use a secure communication channel
• Auto scale
• Endpoint IP address (when scaling application does the WAF
know the new applications)

50. Circuit Breaker Pattern

51. Circuit Breaker Pattern
• To handle faults that might take a variable amount of time to
recover
• When connecting to a remote service or resource

52. Typical Application

53. Problem

55. Circuit Breaker

56. When to use it
• To prevent an application from trying to invoke a remote service
or access a shared resource if this operation is highly likely to fail
• Better user experience

57. When not to use
• Handling access to local private resources in an application, such
as in-memory data structure
• Creates an overhead
• Not a substitute for handling exceptions in the business logic of
your applications

58. Libraries
• Polly (http://www.thepollyproject.org/)
• Netflix (Hystrix) https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

59. Questions?
Taswar Bhatti
System Solutions Architect (Gemalto)
Microsoft MVP
http://taswar.zeytinsoft.com
@taswarbhatti