Designing a cloud architecture for an application with many users

Abstract

The aim of the thesis is to provide a guideline on how to design and implement a cloud architecture solution for an application with many users. For this, general cloud architecture approaches are presented. The theory part is based on techniques of designing a cloud architecture, cloud computing in general, virtualization, databases, and related work of comparisons of cloud computing services. The case objectives of a mobile payment application are stated and defined. On these objectives, a study is conducted on different kinds of cloud backend architecture solutions, which are the tier-based architecture, the message queue architecture, the microservice architecture and the Serverless architecture. The microservice architecture and the Serverless architecture are assessed to be the most promising architectures for the case, because of their excellent scalability. The microservice architecture in Amazon Web Services and the Serverless architecture in Firebase are practically implemented for the case and compared to each other. The Serverless architecture in Firebase is easy to implement and therefore an excellent decision for a cloud architecture with certain limitations. However, the microservice architecture is a more complex architecture, which should be considered if user limits are reached or more configuration possibilities in the architecture are needed.