Cloud development has become prohibitively complex, and the current generation of solutions have low-level interfaces that require extensive investment from developers and operators to understand how to configure, learn, assemble, and scale them properly. For a new architectural shift to occur, we need approaches that absorbs the cognitive load, not streamline it.

Maintain benefits from existing architectures

There has been a continuous discussion among backend and service developers about whether things should be built using one strategy (monoliths) or the other (microservices). There are no one-size-fits-all solutions, because there’s always a trade-off involved.

Monolithic development offers high productivity, ease of deployment, and a straightforward observability story. Microservices offer flexibility in fault isolation, resource tuning and team autonomy. Unfortunately, microservice-based architectures usually involve piecing things back together – back into the monolith’s basic architecture, but with duct tape. As a result, the benefits of neither solution are fully realized.

When building Klotho, we zoomed out and asked, “What aspects of computer engineering can we apply to bridge that gap?”. We concluded that a key characteristic in the new architecture must be the convenience of monolithic development, coupled with an adaptive system that leveraged the benefits found in microservices architectures. Most importantly, it has to reduce the cognitive load for developers, while maintaining configurability and control for operators.

By focusing on developer and operator intent, we created a solution based on ease of use through separation of concerns. Using three different programming constructs, Capabilities, Requirements, and Directives, developers and operators can specify what parts of the application should be cloud-aware, what additional tradeoffs Klotho should consider for your application, and what specific overrides are required.

Solution: Developers should write code the way they know best. We leverage their intent early on to determine what backend wiring and analysis is done behind the scenes to properly meet their needs. Requirements and Directives allow developers and operators to provide more fine tuning and controls without developers needing to change the code.

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The Cloud Architecture of the Next 10 Years – Part 2 – Klotho
Cloud computing has truly reached peak complexity, with the dominant available architectures shifting this complexity from one location to another instead of addressing it at its source. I believe the right solution requires a new architecture that follows key desirable design principles–ones that m…