How to determine the cloud infrastructure solutions?

The determination of cloud infrastructure solutions requires a systematic process from requirement mapping to implementation verification, which should be comprehensively judged based on business characteristics, technical capabilities, and cost compliance requirements. The core steps are as follows:
Step 1: Sort out and quantify business requirements
This is the core foundation for determining the plan, which needs to cover 5 types of core requirements:
Calculation and storage requirements: Clearly define the type of business application (web/database/big data, etc.), expected CPU/GPU resource consumption, total data scale, growth trend, and read/write performance requirements.
Network requirements: Clearly define bandwidth and latency requirements, whether public network access, cross data center interconnectivity, and internal network isolation strategies are needed.
Compliance and Security Requirements: Sort out industry compliance requirements (such as financial insurance, healthcare HIPAA, EU GDPR), clarify specific requirements for data encryption, access control, and audit logs.
Availability requirements: Determine the business recovery objectives RTO (recovery time) and RPO (recovery point), and clarify whether multi availability zones and cross regional disaster recovery deployment are needed.
Scalability requirements: Evaluate the expected business growth in the next 3-5 years and determine whether there is a need for resilience to deal with sudden traffic (such as e-commerce promotions).
Step 2: Select core architecture and technology
Match deployment mode, service mode, and core technology components according to requirements:
Select deployment mode:
Public cloud: suitable for startups and non sensitive businesses, sharing infrastructure can reduce costs;
Private cloud: suitable for industries such as finance and government that require high data security, providing dedicated resource isolation;
Hybrid cloud/multi cloud: Balancing sensitive data security and public cloud resilience, it is currently the mainstream choice for most medium to large enterprises.
Select service mode:
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): suitable for enterprises that require complete customization of the underlying architecture, allowing users to independently control the operating system, storage, and network;
PaaS (Platform as a Service): Development teams can quickly build applications without managing underlying infrastructure, allowing them to focus on application development;
SaaS: suitable for enterprises that do not require underlying architecture management and only need to use software applications.
Core technology selection:
Determine virtualization/containerization technology (KVM/Docker+K8s), network architecture (SDN software defined network), storage solution (distributed block storage/object storage), and design redundant high availability architecture to avoid single point of failure.
Step 3: Plan resources and control costs
Capacity estimation based on business growth expectations: it is necessary to reserve expansion space to avoid resource shortages affecting the business, as well as to avoid cost waste caused by excessive configuration; At the same time, optimize costs through a billing model that combines on-demand and reserved instances, and regularly review resource usage for scheduling optimization.
Step 4: Verify implementation and continuous optimization
After completing the scheme design, conduct small-scale pilot tests to verify whether the performance and stability of the architecture meet the requirements, and then gradually go live in full scale; Continuously monitor the operational status of the architecture after going online, regularly adjust the architecture in conjunction with business changes, and adapt to new business requirements.