The Challenge
Why Cloud Environments Struggle to Scale
Environments that grew one project at a time often lack the design to scale, recover and be rebuilt reliably.
Is This Relevant?
Is This Use Case Relevant to Your Organization?
The people, moments and signals that usually bring this need to the surface.
Relevant Teams
- Cloud and platform architects
- Engineering teams
- IT operations
Common Triggers
- A new product or rapid growth
- An outage caused by design limits
- A move from pilot to production
Warning Signs
- Every environment built differently
- Scaling done by hand
- No tested failover
Typical Environments
- Public cloud, in one or more providers
- Hybrid environments with cloud-hosted services
Benefits
What Better Looks Like
Intended benefits. Actual results depend on your environment and starting point.
Our Approach
A Practical Approach
A cycle of design, testing and improvement, so resilience keeps pace with change. Each stage is tailored to your environment.
Assess
Review architecture, past incidents, monitoring and recovery arrangements.
Prioritize
Rank what you find by business impact, effort and risk, and agree where to start.
Design
Agree availability targets and the design patterns for each service.
Implement
Apply design changes, monitoring and automation in planned stages.
Validate and Optimize
Test failover and recovery, and check performance under load.
Solutions
Solutions That Can Help
The solutions that address this use case, starting with the primary one.
Services
How Signisys Can Support You
The services that deliver the approach, from the first assessment to ongoing improvement.
Technology
Technology Options
Where technology fits in the approach. Specific platforms and partner status are confirmed for each engagement.
Before You Start
What to Consider Before Getting Started
A little preparation makes the first assessment faster and its findings more reliable.
- Expected growth and peak demand
- Availability and recovery targets
- Security and network standards
- Team skills with infrastructure as code
- Who will own the work and act on recommendations
- Engagement model and ongoing support
Measuring Success
How to Measure Success
Illustrative measures. Agree a baseline first, and keep targets separate from measured results.
Availability
The share of time services are available.
Scaling Time
How quickly capacity can be added.
Provisioning Time
How long it takes to build a new environment.
Configuration Drift
Differences between environments and their design.
Our Approach
How We Deliver Results
How Signisys works, from the first assessment to handover and beyond.
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about this use case.
How do we know our cloud architecture needs rework?
Signs include environments built differently each time, scaling done by hand, outages caused by single points of failure and slow, manual rebuilds.
Do we need to rebuild everything at once?
No. Shared patterns are designed first, then applied to new workloads and to existing ones in priority order.
What information is needed to get started?
Current architecture diagrams or descriptions, growth expectations, availability targets and the tools used to build environments today.
Which environments does this apply to?
Public cloud, in one or more providers, and hybrid environments.
How is progress measured?
Agree a baseline for measures such as availability, scaling time, provisioning time and configuration drift, then track them over time.
Related Content
Related Outcomes, Use Cases and Guides
Where to go next: the outcome this use case supports, nearby scenarios, technology partners and practical guides.
Business Outcome
Improve IT Reliability and Business Continuity
Technology Partner
AWS Solutions and Services
Problem Explainer
What Causes Cloud Architectures That Do Not Scale? Common Problems and Warning Signs
Coming soon
How-To Guide
How to Design Scalable and Resilient Cloud Architecture: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide
Coming soon
Checklist
Design Scalable and Resilient Cloud Architecture Checklist: What IT Teams Should Assess
Coming soon
Decision Guide
How to Choose the Right Approach to Design Scalable and Resilient Cloud Architecture: Options and Trade-Offs
Coming soon
Design for Scale
Share your current challenges and priorities with Signisys to explore an approach suited to your environment.