Home/ Questions/Q 426471
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T19:28:58+00:00

I just finished looking at this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/753122/which-cloud-computing-platform-should-i-choose But, I am not certain what

  • 0

I just finished looking at this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/753122/which-cloud-computing-platform-should-i-choose

But, I am not certain what I should do in designing an application for safety engineers, so a high uptime is important.

So, if my application is written in ASP.NET, using SQL Server, it would seem that my best bet is to design for Azure, but would Amazon’s solution be a good choice? How would I decide if I should just have everything on the same system or have the data on Amazon’s cloud and the ASP.NET on Azure?

I have another application that I am working on that deals with utility information, for water and electricity, so there is usage and billing info, and it was written in PHP using SQL Server. Would this be a possibly good application for cloud computing? It would seem that Amazon’s solution would be the best solution for PHP, so my only option, but, how do you decide which parts of their offerings to use?

Basically my question is on the application architecture. Designing for hosting is easy but cloud computing adds new challenges.

My main concern is purely on the design of my application.

If I decide on the language, does that lock me into a cloud solution?

When would I want the database to be in a different cloud than the application?

If I want to use the LIFT framework (written in Scala) would any of them allow me to install whatever I need?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    We run a fairly large financial services SaaS on Amazon AWS.

    There are two general issues at play here: Application Architecture and Cloud Platform Services.

    I have found that our application architecture is essentially the same as it would be if we were deploying to in-house virtual machines or real hardware. We created a fairly standard n-Tier application using mostly open source tools (Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, Terracotta, …). There are some considerations when it comes to a high-available / error tolerant database (since hardware-based options are not available) but other than that we don’t really “target” a particular cloud implementation.

    The Cloud Platform Services is another matter entirely. By that, I mean things like:

    • Starting / Stopping / Monitoring / Managing / Scaling instances
    • Availability / Redundancy (e.g. Amazon has Availability Zones)
    • Deploying / Initializing / Configuring instances
    • File backup / recovery
    • Security (e.g. firewall control)

    There is little if any standardization in that area, though that is an area of active interest.

    In broad terms, you will probably want to architect your application in a cloud-neutral manner, but will create operational procedures that are very specific.

    With regard to splitting the presentation and DB between different providers, I would not suggest that because:

    • If either provider goes down, you are down
    • Data transfer across the internet is slower, more expensive, and less secure than data transfer within one cloud provider.

    A better use of multiple cloud providers would be to deploy entire copies of your application to two or more, balancing load across the two or possibly having one on hot standby in case the primary went down. If you capture transactional data, though, you would need a strategy to reconcile data captured in the standby environment. That may or may not be viable, depending on the nature of your application.

    You can generally install whatever software you like in your virtual servers, though I don’t have specific experience with Azure. If you use AWS or similar services, installing LIFT will not be a problem.

    • 0