Lifecycle

Modern Cloud SDLC

A continuous loop of planning, building, securing, deploying, and monitoring — all automated and observable.

Plan

Azure Boards, Jira, threat modelling, architecture review

Code

Feature branches, PR reviews, SAST in IDE, pre-commit hooks

Build

Docker multi-stage builds, versioned artifacts, SBOM generation

Test

Unit, integration, DAST, performance, chaos engineering

Release

Semantic versioning, changelogs, release notes automation

Deploy

Blue/green, canary, GitOps with ArgoCD/Flux, zero-downtime

Operate

SRE practices, runbooks, incident response, on-call rotation

Monitor

Azure Monitor, Datadog, distributed tracing, cost observability

Microsoft Azure

Azure Cloud Services

Azure is my primary cloud platform. I architect solutions using a combination of PaaS services, containers, and serverless — always choosing the right service for the job, not the most complex one.

AKS

Managed Kubernetes for container orchestration at scale

Functions

Serverless compute for event-driven microservices

Service Bus

Enterprise messaging for decoupled async communication

Cosmos DB

Globally distributed multi-model NoSQL database

Key Vault

Centralized secrets, keys, and certificate management

API Management

Gateway for publishing, securing, and versioning APIs

Amazon Web Services

AWS Cloud Services

AWS architecture experience spanning container orchestration, serverless functions, event-driven messaging, and managed data services — with a focus on cost-optimized, resilient patterns.

EKS

Elastic Kubernetes Service for managed container workloads

Lambda

Serverless functions triggered by events and HTTP requests

SQS / SNS

Fully managed message queuing and pub/sub notifications

DynamoDB

Single-digit millisecond NoSQL with on-demand scaling

API Gateway

REST and WebSocket API management at scale

Secrets Manager

Lifecycle management for secrets, credentials, and API keys

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform & Bicep

Infrastructure as Code is the practice of managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure through version-controlled definition files — not manual clicks. Every resource, network rule, and policy lives in Git.

Terraform
Terraform

Multi-cloud, provider-agnostic. Use for Azure + AWS environments. HCL syntax, state management, modules.

Bicep

Azure-native IaC. Cleaner syntax than ARM templates, first-class Azure integration and type safety.

Pro Tip

Use Terraform Workspaces + remote state in Azure Storage Account with state locking via Azure Blob leases. Store Terraform plans as artifacts and apply only reviewed plans — never run terraform apply directly in CI without a plan review step.

GitOps

GitOps with ArgoCD & Flux

GitOps is the practice of using Git as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure. The cluster continuously reconciles its actual state to match the desired state declared in Git.

Developer pushes to Git

A developer merges a PR with updated Kubernetes manifests or Helm chart values into the deployment repo.

GitOps Operator detects drift

ArgoCD or Flux continuously polls (or receives webhooks) and detects that the cluster state differs from Git.

Automated reconciliation

The operator applies the diff to the cluster. No humans SSH into the cluster. All changes are auditable via Git history.

Drift detection & alerting

Any manual change to the cluster is immediately detected as drift. Alerts are sent and drift is automatically corrected.

Patterns

Cloud Architecture Patterns

Microservices

Decompose applications into independently deployable services. Each service owns its data, exposes an API, and can be scaled independently. Use bounded contexts from DDD.

Serverless First

Prefer managed serverless services (Azure Functions, AWS Lambda) for event-driven, bursty workloads. Pay-per-execution with zero infrastructure management overhead.

CQRS + Event Sourcing

Separate reads from writes. Store state changes as immutable events. Replay events to reconstruct state. Use Azure Service Bus or Kafka as the event backbone.

Strangler Fig

Incrementally migrate legacy monoliths to microservices using the Strangler Fig pattern. Route traffic gradually from the old system to the new using Azure API Management or AWS API Gateway.

BFF Pattern

Backend For Frontend — create dedicated API aggregation layers for each client type (web, mobile, third-party). Reduces over-fetching and simplifies mobile client code (key for React Native and MAUI apps).

Chaos Engineering

Deliberately inject failures to test resilience. Use Azure Chaos Studio or AWS FIS. Start with hypothesis-based experiments in staging before applying to production.