Google Cloud Architecture Framework now available for everyone

Google Cloud’s Architecture Framework is now available to everyone. This framework provides architecture best practices and implementation guidance on products and services to aid your application design choices based on your unique business needs. With the help of this framework, you can quickly identify areas where your approach differs from recommended best practices, so you can apply them across your organisation to ensure standardisation and achieve consistency. 

The framework provides a foundation for building and improving your Google Cloud deployments using four key principles: 

• Operational excellence – Guidance on how to make design choices in the cloud to improve your operational efficiency. These include approaches for automating the build process, implementing monitoring and disaster recovery planning. 
• Security, privacy and compliance – Guidance on various security controls you can choose along with a list of products and features best suited to support security needs for your deployments. 
• Reliability – How to build reliable and highly available solutions. Recommendations include defining reliability goals, improving your approach to observability (including monitoring), establishing an incident management function and techniques to measure and reduce the operational burden on your teams.
• Performance Cost Optimisation – Suggestions on various available tools to tune your applications for a better end-user experience and analyse the cost of operation on Google Cloud while maintaining an acceptable level of service.

Each section provides details on strategies, best practices, design questions, recommendations, and more. You can use this framework during various stages of your cloud journey, from evaluating design choices across various products to incorporating various aspects of security and reliability into your design. You can also use the framework for your existing deployments to help you increase efficiency or incorporate new products and features into your solutions to simplify ongoing management.  

How to use the framework

It is recommended to review the “System Design Considerations” first and then dive into other specific sections based on your needs. 

• Discover: Use the framework as a discovery guide for Google Cloud Platform offerings and learn how the various pieces fit together to build solutions.  
• Evaluate:  Use the design questions outlined in each section to guide your thought process while you’re thinking about your system design. If you’re unable to answer the design question, you can review the highlighted Google Cloud services and features to address them.
• Review:  If you’re already on Google Cloud, use the recommendations section to verify if you are following best practices or as a pulse check to review before deploying to production.

You can learn more about the Google Cloud Architecture Framework here.