In this chapter, we introduced you to hyper-cloud scale and all the implications this aggregation of organized compute means to IT consumers. The global scale, consistency, and reach of these cloud platforms has changed the way we need to think about scalable and available systems.

We introduced the concept of always-on architectures, and the key architectural elements that comprise these systems. Network redundancy, redundant core services, extensive monitoring, IaC, and immutable deployments are all important elements to architect into any cloud-native system.

Building on this always-on approach, we introduced the concept of self-healing infrastructures. For large-scale, cloud-native deployments, automating the recovery and healing of a system is a key feature. This allows systems to recover on their own, but more importantly frees up critically important human resource time to work on improving the system, allowing evolutionary architectures.

We wrapped up this chapter by introducing some of the most popular tools available to architects and IT professionals today. These tools cover all matter of use cases, from configuration managements, automation, monitoring, testing, and microservice mesh management.

In the next chapter, we will talk about the security in the cloud architectures.