Talk on Cloud Design Patterns at Hong Kong Codeaholics Meetup Group. Talk includes External Config Pattern, Cache Aside, Federated Identity Pattern, Valet Key Pattern, Gatekeeper Pattern, Circuit Breaker Pattern, Retry Pattern and the Strangler Pattern. These patterns depicts common problems in designing cloud-hosted applications and design patterns that offer guidance.

1. TaswarBhatti

2. Ponder
• For every 25 percent increase in problem complexity, there is a
100 percent increase in solution complexity.
• There is seldom one best design solution to a software problem.
• If cars were like software, they would crash twice a day for no
reason, and when you called for service, they’d tell you to
reinstall the engine.

3. Who am I
• Taswar Bhatti – Microsoft MVP since 2014
• Global Solutions Architect/System Architect at Gemalto
• In Software Industry since 2000
• Native Hong Kong, but live in Canada now
• I know Kung Fu (Languages)

4. What I am not

6. 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
• The Retry Pattern
• The Strangler Pattern
• Questions

7. Bad Design

8. Bad Design

9. Bad Design

10. Bad Design?

11. Itunes when I use it

12. 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.

13. External Configuration Pattern

14. 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

15. Typical Application

16. Storing Configuration in file

17. Multiple application

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

19. External Configuration Pattern

20. 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

21. 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

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

23. Cache Aside Pattern

24. 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.

25. Typical Application

26. Cache Aside Pattern

27. 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

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

29. 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

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

31. Federated Identity Pattern

32. 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

33. Typical Application

34. Problem

35. 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

36. Federated Identity Pattern

37. 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

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

39. 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

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

41. Valet Key Pattern

42. 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

43. Typical Application
Client App Storage

44. Problem
Client App Storage
Client
Client Client
Client

45. Valet Key Pattern
Client App
Generate Token
Limited Time
And Scope
Storage

46. 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

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

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

49. Gatekeeper Pattern

50. 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

51. Typical Application

52. Problem

53. Gatekeeper Pattern

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

55. When not to use
• Performance vs security

56. 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)

57. Circuit Breaker Pattern

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

59. Typical Application

60. Problem

61. Client
Circuit
Breaker
Api
Closed State
Timeout
Closed State
Open State
Half Open State
After X Retry
Closed State

62. Circuit Breaker

63. 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

64. 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

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

66. Retry pattern

67. Retry Pattern
• Enable an application to handle transient failures
• When the applications tries to connect to a service or network
resource
• By transparently retrying a failed operation

68. Typical Application
Network Failure

69. Retry Pattern
• Retry after 2, 5 or 10 seconds

70. When to use it
• Use retry for only transient failure that is more than likely to
resolve themselves quicky
• Match the retry policies with the application
• Otherwise use the circuit break pattern

71. When not to use it
• Don’t cause a chain reaction to all components
• For internal exceptions caused by business logic
• Log all retry attempts to the service

72. Libraries
• Roll your own code
• Polly (http://www.thepollyproject.org/)
• Netflix (Hystrix) https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

73. Strangler Pattern

74. Strangler Pattern
• Incrementally migrate a legacy system
• Gradually replacing specific pieces of functionality with new
applications and services
• Features from the legacy system are replaced by new system
features eventually
• Strangling the old system and allowing you to decommission it

75. Monolith Application

76. Strangler Pattern

77. When to use
• Gradually migrating a back-end application to a new
architecture

78. When not to use
• When requests to the back-end system cannot be intercepted
• For smaller systems where the complexity of wholesale
replacement is low

79. Considerations
• Handle services and data stores that are potentially used by
both new and legacy systems.
• Make sure both can access these resources side-by-side
• When migration is complete, the strangler façade will either go
away or evolve into an adaptor for legacy clients
• Make sure the façade doesn't become a single point of failure or
a performance bottleneck.

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