Solving Web-based Applications Architectural Problems in the Cloud: The Way Forward

Highly-available and scalable software systems can be a complex and expensive proposition. Traditional scalable software architectures have not only needed to implement complex solutions to ensure high levels of reliability, but have also required an accurate forecast of traffic to provide a high level of customer service. This traditional software architecture is built around a common three-tier web application model that separates the architecture into presentation, business logic and database layers. This architecture has already been designed to scale out by adding additional hosts at these layers and has built-in performance, failover and availability features. Even with all these developments in architectural designs, some software still lacks in scalability, reliability and efficiency. This paper therefore examines the shortfalls of traditional software architectural problems with a view to addressing them using the cloud computing approach.