Public Cloud: The Phases of Your Journey
For an efficient cloud-journey plan to be designed, you must consider the transformation of your technology model as the journey evolves. It is always good to remember that the cloud focuses on high availability, reliability, and automation. Topics such as minimal infrastructure, lean teams, flexibility and fast access to cutting-edge technology are among the advantages offered by this technology. And how to know if companies should start this journey?
To support the companies in this decision, the four phases that will be considered when starting a typical journey towards the construction of a truly sustainable information technology infrastructure in the public cloud will be presented.
Initial cloud deployments focus on trying to replicate their on-premise infrastructure to a cloud platform. Understandably, many think that this is also the end of the process of an extremely familiar platform that is understood inside and out, but also solves one of its most pressing problems: capacity constraints.
Companies can spend years in the first phase, simply expanding outward as demand for processing and storage increases. And because everything is so familiar, the DevOps model allows companies to remain as normal while maintaining the same level of productivity and efficiency they have always liked.
But if a business stays at this early stage of its first cloud strategy, they may find that early successes will not be carried forward into the future.
Phase 2 should only be started when the company’s financial management begins to ask difficult questions. Although the organization has reduced capital spending on hardware, cloud costs continue to spiral. The problem is that unlimited cloud scalability can cause unforeseen problems for cloud developers and systems engineers with no experience. Developers can make use of as many cloud provider services as they wish, but all are charged accordingly. Which means that many allocate many resources inefficiently or unnecessarily.
The IT department initiates reengineering systems to align them with the various rules by which public cloud costs are calculated. For example, by creating users and groups, companies can control who is allowed to request public cloud resources. Immediately, systems become more efficient in terms of operations and costs.
As their experience with cloud technologies deepens, developers also increase the level of automation used for their hosted systems. As an example, in a return to batch processing principles, virtual machines will run during off-hours to reduce operating costs. The Auto Scaling feature, for example, allows developers to limit the scale of features based on a predefined schedule, ensuring that resources are available according to predictable demand and released outside those hours so that the spend is aligned with the use.
With redesigned systems for the cloud and automation run to streamline operations, the company’s financial manager will be much happier when the accounts come back under control. Spending may still increase, but this rationalization process ensures that costs are better contained and fully justified.
Although the costs are now under control, the hosted infrastructure is still relatively resource-intensive when it comes to management. At the end of phase 2, the applications still reside in virtual machines installed in a hypervisor, that is, it lies on top of the cloud layer.
Many of these virtualized systems will be defined and forgotten, but this is to minimize the work involved in configuring them at the time of deployment. There is also the reality that large-scale configuration changes will be needed and the information technology team will need to do the work to ensure systems continue to function as expected.
With applications, binaries and libraries, operating system, and a hypervisor installed on top of the host operating system, there are several levels that need to be managed.
