Cloud & Infrastructure Playbook

Four field guides that turn “what cloud model should we use?” into the decision it actually is: placing each workload, on purpose. The arc runs top-down — the deployment models are vocabulary; then, per workload, you choose an environment, a security neighborhood within it, and a reliability archetype. The “cloud model” you end up with is just the sum of those answers. Each part ships as an architecture infographic, a deep-dive PDF you can hand to your team, and a checklist — written from twenty-plus years of Fortune 500 infrastructure and platform work, in the same vendor-neutral spirit as the rest of this site.

By Tom Ward, Enterprise Architect — Cloud & Infrastructure

• Part 1 of 4 PDF

  The Five Cloud Deployment Models

  Every cloud strategy conversation starts with the same argument: public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud? It's the wrong argument. If you run a large enterprise, you're already all of them. A practitioner's primer on the five deployment models, their real trade-offs, and why the models are just vocabulary while the actual work is deciding what runs where.

  Read part 1
• Part 2 of 4 PDF

  Where Each Workload Belongs

  A data-center exit almost always starts with the wrong sentence: “we're moving to the cloud.” That collapses three different decisions into one — and it's how migrations miss their budgets and their reliability targets. Colocation is your own private cloud in a rented building; public cloud is a different operating model. A per-workload framework for the three doors out of a data center, and the six signals that decide which one each workload takes.

  Read part 2
• Part 3 of 4 PDF

  Architecture Neighborhoods

  Drop a few hundred applications into a data center — or an availability zone, or a cloud region — and the real question isn't “which rack?” It's “which neighborhood?” You don't seat an internet-facing, low-trust application next to your crown-jewel data. A working guide to zoning every environment into risk-based neighborhoods — and why getting them right is what lets a migration keep its security posture instead of quietly weakening it.

  Read part 3
• Part 4 of 4 PDF

  Cloud Deployment Archetypes

  Three nines is 43 minutes of downtime a month; five nines is 5 minutes a year. You don't close that gap by trying harder — you choose a deployment archetype that can deliver it, and pay what it costs. A working guide to the six cloud archetypes as a ladder, from Zonal to Global (with Hybrid and Multi-cloud as compositions, not rungs), drawn from Berenberg and Calder's Open-Access ACM Computing Surveys paper.

  Read part 4