Whether you’re moving an existing application to the cloud or starting afresh on the cloud with a brand new application, CAP is an important topic to consider when (re)designing the architecture of your app. CAP stands for Consistency, Availability and Partitioning, three characteristics that are key when designing a distributed application. These three characterictics have an important bearing on the capability of your application to scale up or down with no negative impact which is a basic requirement for cloud based applications.
To sum up, CAP is an important part of any systems architecture – be it on the cloud, hosted or on-premises and the overall objective is to find and design the appropriate balance between the three requirements for your application.

Cloud computing is getting increasing attention as more and more companies are availing of cloud based services and as the maturity of cloud services evolves. As with any new technology trend, it’s important to remember that certain basic principles apply, particularly from a customer’s perspective, when they are assessing the costs and benefits of cloud based services. In this post, I would like to cover some of these basic principles, in the areas of features/requirements analysis, security and regulation.