Common Architecture Anti-Patterns

An anti-pattern is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. In cloud architecture, anti-patterns lead to workloads that are fragile, expensive, insecure, or difficult to operate. Understanding these anti-patterns — and knowing how to avoid them — is a critical skill for any cloud architect.

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1. Single Availability Zone Deployment

The Anti-Pattern

Deploying all resources in a single Availability Zone (AZ). If that AZ experiences an outage, the entire workload goes down.

Why It Happens

• Teams want to keep things simple during initial development
• Cross-AZ data transfer costs are seen as unnecessary
• Developers are not aware of AZ-level failures

The Fix

Deploy across at least two Availability Zones. Use Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic and Auto Scaling to maintain capacity in each AZ. For databases, use Multi-AZ deployments in RDS or Aurora.