Hybrid and multicloud architecture patterns

Last reviewed 2024-10-24 UTC

This document is the second of three documents in a set. It discusses common hybrid and multicloud architecture patterns. It also describes the scenarios that these patterns are best suited for. Finally, it provides the best practices you can use when deploying such architectures in Google Cloud.

The document set for hybrid and multicloud architecture patterns consists of these parts:

Every enterprise has a unique portfolio of application workloads that place requirements and constraints on the architecture of a hybrid or multicloud setup. Although you must design and tailor your architecture to meet these constraints and requirements, you can rely on some common patterns to define the foundational architecture.

An architecture pattern is a repeatable way to structure multiple functional components of a technology solution, application, or service to create a reusable solution that addresses certain requirements or use cases. A cloud-based technology solution is often made of several distinct and distributed cloud services. These services collaborate to deliver required functionality. In this context, each service is considered a functional component of the technology solution. Similarly, an application can consist of multiple functional tiers, modules, or services, and each can represent a functional component of the application architecture. Such an architecture can be standardized to address specific business use cases and serve as a foundational, reusable pattern.

To generally define an architecture pattern for an application or solution, identify and define the following:

  • The components of the solution or application.
  • The expected functions for each component—for example, frontend functions to provide a graphical user interface or backend functions to provide data access.
  • How the components communicate with each other and with external systems or users. In modern applications, these components interact through well-defined interfaces or APIs. There are a wide range of communication models such as asynchronous and synchronous, request-response, or queue-based.

The following are the two main categories of hybrid and multicloud architecture patterns:

  • Distributed architecture patterns: These patterns rely on a distributed deployment of workloads or application components. That means they run an application (or specific components of that application) in the computing environment that suits the pattern best. Doing so lets the pattern capitalize on the different properties and characteristics of distributed and interconnected computing environments.
  • Redundant architecture patterns: These patterns are based on redundant deployments of workloads. In these patterns, you deploy the same applications and their components in multiple computing environments. The goal is to either increase the performance capacity or resiliency of an application, or to replicate an existing environment for development and testing.

When you implement the architecture pattern that you select, you must use a suitable deployment archetype. Deployment archetypes are zonal, regional, multi-regional, or global. This selection forms the basis for constructing application-specific deployment architectures. Each deployment archetype defines a combination of failure domains within which an application can operate. These failure domains can encompass one or more Google Cloud zones or regions, and can be expanded to include your on-premises data centers or failure domains in other cloud providers.

This series contains the following pages:

Contributors

Author: Marwan Al Shawi | Partner Customer Engineer

Other contributors:

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Distributed architecture patterns