cloud-design-patterns

name	cloud-design-patterns
description	Cloud design patterns for distributed systems architecture covering 42 industry-standard patterns across reliability, performance, messaging, security, and deployment categories. Use when designing, reviewing, or implementing distributed system architectures.

Cloud Design Patterns

Architects design workloads by integrating platform services, functionality, and code to meet both functional and nonfunctional requirements. Cloud design patterns provide solutions to many common challenges in distributed systems.

How Cloud Design Patterns Enhance the Design Process

Cloud workloads are vulnerable to the fallacies of distributed computing:

• The network is reliable.
• Latency is zero.
• Bandwidth is infinite.
• The network is secure.
• Topology doesn't change.
• There's one administrator.
• Component versioning is simple.
• Observability implementation can be delayed.

These misconceptions can result in flawed workload designs. Design patterns don't eliminate these misconceptions but help raise awareness, provide compensation strategies, and provide mitigations. Each cloud design pattern has trade-offs. Focus on why you should choose a specific pattern instead of how to implement it.

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Pattern Categories at a Glance

Category	Patterns	Focus
Reliability & Resilience	9 patterns	Fault tolerance, self-healing, graceful degradation
Performance	10 patterns	Caching, scaling, load management, data optimization
Messaging & Integration	7 patterns	Decoupling, event-driven communication, workflow coordination
Architecture & Design	7 patterns	System boundaries, API gateways, migration strategies
Deployment & Operational	5 patterns	Infrastructure management, geo-distribution, configuration
Security	3 patterns	Identity, access control, content validation
Event-Driven Architecture	1 pattern	Event sourcing and audit trails

Key Patterns for This Project

Relevant to the KB Agent Pipeline

Pattern	Relevance
Pipes and Filters	fn-convert → fn-index two-stage pipeline
Queue-Based Load Leveling	Storage queue between convert and index functions
Retry	Azure Function triggers with retry policies
Circuit Breaker	External API calls (AI Services, Cosmos DB)
Cache-Aside	AI Search index as a read cache over KB content
External Configuration Store	Environment-driven config via .env and azd
Gateway Routing	APIM as API gateway for agent endpoint
Sidecar	Container Apps with shared infrastructure
Federated Identity	Azure Managed Identity + Entra ID auth
Backends for Frontends	Same-origin image proxy avoids SAS token complexity

Pattern Selection Guide

When designing or reviewing architecture:

1. Identify the challenge — reliability, performance, security, integration?
2. Match to category — use the table above
3. Evaluate trade-offs — every pattern has costs
4. Validate against requirements — align with Well-Architected Framework pillars
5. Document decisions — record pattern choices in ARDs (docs/ards/)

External Links

• Cloud Design Patterns - Azure Architecture Center
• Azure Well-Architected Framework