Start with a Monolith
The most common mistake I see is teams jumping to microservices before they understand their domain. Start with a well-structured monolith. It's faster to build, easier to debug, and you can extract services once you understand the actual boundaries.
Design for Failure
In the cloud, everything can and will fail. Design with this assumption: use retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, health checks, and multi-AZ deployments for anything critical.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule
Keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with 1 offsite. For databases: enable point-in-time recovery, test your restores quarterly, and know your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) before an incident, not during.
Cost Optimization From Day One
Cloud bills can spiral fast. Tag all resources, set budget alerts, right-size instances based on actual metrics (not guesses), use Spot instances for non-critical workloads, and review your bill weekly in early stages.
Security Is Not an Afterthought
Least privilege IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, VPC isolation, secrets management (never hardcode credentials), and WAF for public-facing services. These are not optional.
Observability: Logs, Metrics, Traces
You can't fix what you can't see. Set up structured logging from day one, instrument key business metrics, and implement distributed tracing before your system gets complex. The best time to add observability is before you need it.
James Carter
Cloud Solutions Architect