Building a Solution? The Cloud Architecture Center has Blueprints

Cloud Architecture Center

Remember the days when a simple text client and a small database server were the core enterprise solution? These days data flows from various endpoints to data lakes or data reservoirs, data streams are analyzed in real time to trade stacks, prevent fraud, to react to sensor data. How are other companies building their solutions or what are best practices? What products or services can be used? Great that the new Cloud Architecture Center offers blueprints.


Right now the IBM developerWorks Cloud Architecture Center features an architecture gallery where you can filter the available blueprints by overall area like data & analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), Mobile or Web Application. Another filter criterias are by industry or capability, i.e., you could look for sample solution for the insurance industry or a use-case featuring a Hybrid Cloud scenario.

Partial view: Architecture for Cloud Solution

For the selected architecture and solution you are presented with the overall blueprint (as partially shown in the screenshot) and are offered information about the flow, the included components are deployed services and products, and get an overview of the functional and non-functional requirements. Depending on the solution there are links to sample applications, code repositories on GitHub, and more reading material. See the Personality Insights as a good example.

The Architecture Center offers great material for enterprise architects and solution designers and the linked samples and demos are also a good start for developers.

(Update 2016-02-21): There is a new and good overview article with focus on Big Data in the cloud and possible architecture.