This chapter introduces and describes several of the more common foundational cloud architectural models, each exemplifying a common usage and characteristic of contemporary cloud-based environments. The involvement and importance of different combinations of cloud computing mechanisms in relation to these architectures are explored.
IT resources can be horizontally scaled via the addition of one or more identical IT resources, and a load balancer that provides runtime logic capable of evenly distributing the workload among the available IT resources (Figure 1). The resulting workload distribution architecture reduces both IT resource over-utilization and under-utilization to an extent dependent upon the sophistication of the load balancing algorithms and runtime logic.