"Planning typically accounts for load increases of two or three times, but when systems are deployed on the internet, control over incoming traffic, timing, and use patterns becomes impossible. Any event can trigger massive load increases, whether from legitimate business growth or malicious actors. Both scenarios present distinct challenges. Security controls can block malicious traffic, but different considerations arise when genuine customer demand surges due to market volatility. Customers require access to financial transactions precisely when such situations occur."
"Design for unpredictable scale: Handle ten times the number of traffic spikes with reserved capacity and circuit breakers. Classify infrastructure by criticality, strategically focusing efforts, because not everything needs one hundred percent availability. Automate everything: build self-healing systems that recover before human intervention. Optimize performance at every layer: edge computing, traffic shaping, and content delivery networks (CDNs) for speed. Contain the blast radius: multi-region architecture that isolates failures to small user percentages."
Cloud migration at a major financial institution prioritized three goals: scalable cost-effective capacity, high resilience, and extensive automation. Systems were designed to tolerate unpredictable internet-driven traffic, planning for tenfold spikes through reserved capacity, circuit breakers, and traffic shaping. Infrastructure was classified by criticality to focus engineering and availability investments where needed. Self-healing automation and orchestration reduced time to recovery and minimized human intervention. Performance was optimized across layers using edge computing and CDNs to improve latency. Multi-region architectures and blast-radius containment isolated failures to small user cohorts, reducing systemic impact during stress or malicious events.
Read at InfoQ
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]