Initially, deploying to cloud may seem like getting a few VMs and storage on the cloud and develop or roll out your existing application. However, you will soon realize that your are missing something. Several questions will start to pop up and you will need to either plug-in to the cloud services you have already running, or provision it. For example, the question may be how would you authenticate, authorize or provide single sign on(SSO) to users for your applications?  Next, how would you integrate this application with other applications you may have on-premise or in the same or other clouds? How would you monitor the infrastructure you just provisioned? Who is going to backup my application data and how? What if I want to load balance across multiple servers? For production workload it would be advisable to create Virtual Cloud Network on Oracle or Virtual Private Cloud on Amazon to logically isolate the cloud. The list goes on.

To ensure that you’ve all the bases covered, you may want refer to a cloud reference architecture.  I used the combination of Togaf and Oracle’s ITSOA to come up with a simplified version of architecture map to figure out what services a real world application will need (See figure above). You can use this with the “Top Ten Questions..” to finalize all the services you need.

For the point is case, once you have provisioned compute, storage and network, most likely you will need some security services such as Oracle Identity Cloud Service. If you need to integrate your application with Salesforce , Workday or any other apps, than you will need Oracle Integration Cloud Services. Once deployed, you will need to start monitoring it with AWS CloudWatch or Oracle Management Cloud Services. You can use the capabilities or service map like to ensure that you have thought through everything for successful roll out on the cloud.

Next, we will take a look at similar architecture map for Amazon Services. Stay tuned!!