Ok so you have been made a tech lead/architect and you have been tasked to build an elegant, performant, scalable, cloud application. What would you do? There are a lot of decisions that you are going to make and you are accountable for these. Things like what cloud provider to choose? What data storage you choose? What compute unit to choose? How to secure it? How to protect it? How to communicate the design well to the devs to implement it? What messaging components to use? How to verify you design against functional and non functional specs? And the list goes on and on I have been lucky enough to be involved and leading some of the great projects in my career and I was there from day 1 ( in some cases). I have had to make many of these decisions. Some of them were good and others turned out not too great. In this talk, I will share with you my experience and the approach that I have developed. My process works for most project and it creates a good recipe for rinse and repeat. The talk would be full of demos to demo the impact of these decision.