Pitching IaC to Stakeholders

As a Cloud Architect, I have several times explained to our stakeholders regarding Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how it makes our cloud project a no-brainer, especially for applications running on the cloud.

In every discussion, I keep explaining how all our development work can be super fast without any mistakes, reusable, and save us tons of time and money in the future.

The first question I always get is, what is wrong with the current manual ways, and it has served us well so far? Will the cost increase our short-term budget?

I take a deep breath and re-iterate that having a blueprint always saves time, increases accuracy, and saves costs in the long run. IaC simplifies future changes, and environments can be replicated without any major rework. 

The gap between Business and IT often arises not due to the incapability of IaC but the challenge of translating its intricacies into a language both realms can comprehend. An Architect has to be persistent and repetitive. 

With Cloud first implementations, surely there will be a time when Businesses in large organizations will take efficiency and automation seriously.

The advent of Observability Driven Development

A distributed application landscape with high cardinality makes it difficult for dedicated operation teams to monitor system behavior via a dashboard or react abruptly to system alerts and notifications. In a microservices architecture with several moving parts, detecting failures becomes cumbersome, and developers end up looking at errors like finding a needle in a haystack.

What is Observability?

Observability is more than a quality attribute and one level above monitoring, where the focus applies more to cultivating ways of working within development teams to have a holistic data-driven mindset when it comes to solving system issues.

An observability thought process enables development teams to embed the monitoring aspect right at the nascent stage of development and testing.

Observability in a DevSecOps ecosystem

Several Organizations are adopting a DevSecOps culture, and it has become essential for development teams to become self-reliant and have a proactive approach to identify, heal and prevent systems faults. DevOps focuses on giving the development teams ability to make rapid decisions and more control to access infrastructure assets. Observability enhances this by empowering development teams to be more instinctive when it comes to defining system faults.

Furthermore, the modern ways of working with Agile, Test Driven Development, and Automation enable development teams to get deep insights into operations that can potentially be prone to failures.

Observability on Cloud platforms

Applications deployed on Cloud provide the development teams with several out-of-box myriads of system measurements. Developers can gauge and derive quality attributes of a system even before a code goes into production. Cloud services make it easy to collate information like metrics, diagnostics, logs, and traces for analysis, and they are available at the developer’s behest. AI-based automated diagnostics along with real-time data give developers deep acumen into their System Semantics and characteristics.

Conclusion

Observability is more of an open-ended process of inculcating modern development principles to increase the reliability of complex distributed systems. The benefits of the Observability mindset helps organizations resolve production issues speedily, reduces dependency and cost on manual operations. It also benefits development teams to build dependable systems helping end customers with a seamless user experience.

Key Architectural Considerations to Evaluate when moving applications to cloud - Part 2

  Ø  If an application migration requires lot of integration or coordination between internal and external environments on top of the cloud services, it will become a layer between the cloud provider and inhouse applications will struggle to keep up with the rate of innovation in the cloud provider’s services. Cloud provides numerous services that are portable. Organizations should not build or acquire layers of insulation on top of cloud provider's native features in order to perceive portability.

  Ø  Modern cloud service providers can auto scale in order to create a resilient and highly available applications. The cloud service providers have different solutions to provide the ability to store and replicate data. If a legacy application is critical enough to meet the requirement of fault tolerant,  moving such applications to the cloud can be easier to manage.

  Ø  Cloud is a better fit if Speed and Agility are the primary business drivers of an organization. In order to do so it is required for applications to have continuous and direct access to the cloud provider's fast pace of innovation. Only by building directly upon provider-native features will there be the desired business agility and rate of improvement. Organizations will struggle to easily port applications across cloud providers by sacrificing speed, agility and innovation.

  Ø  Another area to consider is the factor of repeatability for applications. Typical scheduled deployment times in legacy application require a down time along with human intervention in doing the same manual tasks repeatedly. Also, in case of disaster recovery or outage most of the tasks carried out are manual. Typical cloud services excel to execute the same tasks multiple times without failure. Most of the application recovery or deployments are auto managed and incur very little to no human interventions.

  Ø  Cloud services generally provides high flexibility and testability. Applications can be tuned to run on need basis. Test environment application can be a good candidate to move to the cloud especially when doing a load or stress testing. Different applications can be made available on the fly based on different hardware configuration, operating system and different regions and can be scaled up or down on need basis. This gets even easier with cloud providers excelling in containerized application and providing seamless continuous integration and deployment.

  Ø  If high performance, monitoring, volatility and high volume are the key requirement then the application needs quick development and high rate of innovation.  Cloud vendors do provide ready-made solutions to meet all such requirements. Performance benchmarks can be met with different solutions that fulfil the key constraints of Caching, Sharding, Archiving and Storage. Readymade tools can be configured to meet the requirement of in-depth monitoring, logging and analysing. Cloud providers have rich support for state-of-the art agile development modes including DevOps, containers, microservices and will be the first to have mature support for upcoming methods like serverless computing etc. Different pricing models and tenancy are also provided that can ensure cost is kept to the minimum.

How to decide to move legacy applications to Cloud

What type of Private Cloud should organization invest?

Private cloud computing is a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization that is isolated from others. A private cloud is unitenant and prevents exposure of data to external world or internet and results in better performance with less security risks.

A private cloud or the enterprise cloud resides on company’s intranet (internal data center) or hosted data center where the firewall protects the data. Hence, they are classified into two categories

    
       a)    On Premise Hosted Private Cloud   

      b )    Off Premise Hosted Private Cloud

In an On Premise Hosted private cloud the organization has to take care of the all the infrastructure including maintenance, licensing costs etc. Whereas in the Off Premise Hosted Private Cloud solution all the overheads are outsourced to the managing vendor.

In either of the categories one major advantage of Private cloud is that it offers a dedicated secured storage of infrastructure that is not accessible to others. Thus, providing enhanced security and further option to implement various levels of authentication and security for the infrastructure. Further organizations can decide to choose the one or more data centers either on premise or with dedicated service providers.

On Premise Hosted Private Cloud requires initial investment of dedicated hardware infrastructure and hence is suitable for organizations that has determined its cloud priorities with existing infrastructure cost or that require less investment in cost of new infrastructure. Organizations with existing data centers can look at this option as they can utilize the existing infrastructure to move to private cloud.

Since the organization maintains the infrastructure, licensing cost, management of upgrades, installations, maintenance and administration has to be done in house. This can be expensive and not suit organizations that require additional cost in investment to setup on premise or service provider-based data center and administration costs.

One of the other advantages of On Premise Hosted Private Cloud is that it allows customization of their cloud infrastructure according to the business needs and increase scalability and flexibility. However, this is also a disadvantage for organizations where on demand need for scaling virtual computing services is a challenge.  

Private cloud also suits organizations that are investing in the growing awareness of the advantages provided by virtualization technology. It enables organizations to improve infrastructure cost, performance and improve usage of underutilized hardware.

Hence, investing in On premise hosted private cloud is a good option for organizations with considerable predictability and consistency in infrastructure cost and demands. Organizations that have existing services and that can depict data related to infrastructure usage and statistics are in a better position to handle the demands and avoid the cost issue of under-utilized infrastructure. Also, this service suits organizations for whom control and security is of top most priority.

Off Premise or external hosted private cloud can be an option if organization want to be unitenant and cannot afford to scale, maintain and administer the On Premise Private cloud.