Get to know Google Cloud with our new Architecture Framework

Are you using Google Cloud or thinking about making the move to the cloud? Are you a cloud architect or cloud engineer who needs to ensure your services are secure and reliable yet also manageable during day-to-day operations? We have heard feedback from many of you that you need a structured approach for efficiently running your business on Google Cloud and today we’re excited to deliver just that. 

Today we are making Google Cloud's Architecture Framework available to everyone. This framework provides architecture best practices and implementation guidance on products and services to aid your application design choices based on your unique business needs. With the help of this framework, you can quickly identify areas where your approach differs from recommended best practices, so you can apply them across your organization to ensure standardization and achieve consistency. 

The framework provides a foundation for building and improving your Google Cloud deployments using four key principles: 

• Operational excellence - Guidance on how to make design choices in the cloud to improve your operational efficiency. These include approaches for automating the build process, implementing monitoring and disaster recovery planning. 

• Security, privacy and compliance - Guidance on various security controls you can choose along with a list of products and features best suited to support security needs for your deployments. 

• Reliability - How to build reliable and highly available solutions. Recommendations include defining reliability goals, improving your approach to observability (including monitoring), establishing an incident management function, and techniques to measure and reduce the operational burden on your teams.

• Performance Cost Optimization - Suggestions on various available tools to tune your applications for a better end-user experience and analyze the cost of operation on Google Cloud, while maintaining an acceptable level of service.

Each section provides details on strategies, best practices, design questions, recommendations, and more. You can use this framework during various stages of your cloud journey, from evaluating design choices across various products to incorporating various aspects of security and reliability into your design. You can also use the framework for your existing deployments to help you increase efficiency or incorporate new products and features into your solutions to simplify ongoing management.  

How to use the framework

We recommend reviewing the “System Design Considerations” first and then dive into other specific sections based on your needs. 

• Discover: Use the framework as a discovery guide for Google Cloud Platform offerings and learn how the various pieces fit together to build solutions.  
• Evaluate:  Use the design questions outlined in each section to guide your thought process while you’re thinking about your system design. If you’re unable to answer the design question, you can review the highlighted Google Cloud services and features to address them.
• Review:  If you’re already on Google Cloud, use the recommendations section to verify if you are following best practices or as a pulse check to review before deploying to production.

The framework is modular so you can pick and choose sections most relevant to you, but we recommend reading all of the sections, because why not! 

You can learn more about the Google Cloud Architecture Framework here and contact us for additional insights. 

A special thanks to a village of Googlers who helped deliver this framework, Matt Salisbury, Gustavo Franco, Charles Baer, Tiffany Lewis, Vivek Rau, Shylaja Nukala, Jan Bultmann, Ryan Martin, Dom Jimenez, Hamidou Dia, Lindsey Scrase, Lakshmi Sharma, Amr Awadallah, Ben Jackson, Jim Travis