Top 10 Architecture Blog Posts of 2021

The AWS Architecture Blog highlights best practices and provides architectural guidance. We publish thought leadership pieces and how-tos. Check out the AWS Architecture Monthly Magazine, also published by our team, which offers a selection of the best new technical content from AWS!

A big thank you to you, our readers, for spending time on our blog this past quarter. Of course, we wouldn’t have content for you to read without our hard-working AWS Solutions Architects and other blog post writers either, so thank you to them as well! Without further ado, the following 10 posts were the top Architecture Blog posts published in 2021!

#10: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part IV: Multi-site Active/Active

by Seth Eliot

You’ll notice a recurring theme in this post—Seth’s four-part DR series is really popular! Throughout the series, Seth shows you different strategies to prepare your workload for disaster events like natural disasters like earthquakes or floods, technical failures such as power or network loss, and human actions such as inadvertent or unauthorized modifications.

In Part IV, Seth teaches you how to implement an active/active strategy to run your workload and serve requests in two or more distinct sites. Like other DR strategies, this enables your workload to remain available despite disaster events such as natural disasters, technical failures, or human actions.

#9: Scaling up a Serverless Web Crawler and Search Engine

by Jack Stevenson

Building a search engine can be a challenge. You must continually scrape the web and index its content so it can be retrieved quickly in response to a user’s query. In this post, Jack describes how to implement this in a way that avoids infrastructure complexity while remaining elastic with a serverless search engine that can scale to crawl and index large web pages.

#8: Managing Asynchronous Workflows with a REST API

by Scott Gerring

While building REST APIs, architects often discover that they have particular operations that have to run in the background outside of the request processing scope. In this post, Scott shows you common patterns for handling REST API operations, their advantages/disadvantages, and their typical Serverless on AWS implementations.

#7: Data Caching Across Microservices in a Serverless Architecture

by Irfan Saleem, Pallavi Nargund, and Peter Buonora

In this post, Irfan, Pallavi, and Peter discuss a couple of customer use cases that use Serverless on AWS offerings to maintain a cache close to the microservices layer. This improves performance by reducing or eliminating the need for the real-time backend calls and by reducing latency and service-to-service communication.

#6: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part III: Pilot Light and Warm Standby

by Seth Eliot

Part III of Seth’s DR series discusses two strategies to prepare your workload for a disaster event: pilot light and warm standby. This post shows you how to implement these strategies that help you limit data loss and downtime and how to get the most out of your set up.

#5: Issues to Avoid When Implementing Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda

by Andrei Maksimov

In the post, Andrei highlights eight common anti-patterns (solutions that may look like the right solution but end up being less effective than intended). He provides recommendations to avoid these patterns to ensure that your system is performing at its best.

#4: Using Route 53 Private Hosted Zones for Cross-account Multi-region Architectures

by Anandprasanna Gaitonde and John Bickle

In this post, Anandprasanna and John present an architecture that provides a unified view of DNS while allowing different AWS accounts to manage subdomains. They show you how hybrid cloud environments can utilize the features of Route 53 Private Hosted Zones to allow for scalability and high availability for business applications.

#3: Micro-frontend Architectures on AWS

by Bryant Bost

Despite microservice architectures’ popularity, many frontend applications are still built in a monolithic style. In this post, Bryant shows you how micro-frontend architectures introduce many of the familiar benefits of microservice development to frontend applications. This simplifies the process of building complex frontend applications by allowing you to manage small, independent components.

#2: Disaster Recovery (DR) Architecture on AWS, Part I: Strategies for Recovery in the Cloud

by Seth Eliot

Part I of Seth’s DR series gives you an overview of each strategy in the series (backup and restore, pilot light, standby, multi-site active/active) and how to select the best strategy for your business needs. Disaster events pose a threat to your workload availability, but by using AWS Cloud services you can mitigate or remove these threats.

#1: Overview of Data Transfer Costs for Common Architectures

by Birender Pal, Sebastian Gorczynski, and Dennis Schmidt

With 60,7070 views, this team has definitely earned their top spot! Data transfer charges are often overlooked while architecting a solution in AWS. Considering data transfer charges while making architectural decisions can help save costs. This post will help you identify potential data transfer charges you may encounter while operating your workload on AWS.

Thank you!

Thanks again to all our readers and blog post writers. Your contributions to the blog are immensely valuable to all our customers! Keep on writing!

We look forward to continuing to learn and build amazing things together in 2022.