Cloud Archives - Galaxy Weblinks

How to Scale on Cloud Computing; Made Easy for You

Posted on November 24, 2021October 9, 2024 by galaxy-admin

“What kind of cloud services do you use?”.

Cloud services are categorized into Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS).

The traditional, on-premise deployments require managing your software as well as IT investments. IaaS, such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure provides a pay-as-you-go service for storage, networking, and virtualization. A step further are PaaS options such as Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine, IBM Cloud that also provide services such as hardware and software development.

SaaS options such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 are at the top of the Cloud Services table. You get an option of subscribing to end-to-end software solutions.

Cloud Computing drives every little thing in today’s world, including jobs, applications, services, data, and platforms. The cloud is scalable and flexible. It also provides security and control over the data center.

The future of Cloud computing will be a combination of cloud-based software products and on-premises computing. There will be hybrid IT solutions. The shift to public cloud computing is the dominant trend in the industry. This will make cloud technology even bigger going forward.

Currently, cloud computing is dominated by three major players. We all know who they are – Google, Microsoft (Azure), and Amazon (AWS). These cloud computing providers are huge and are rapidly growing. These three did under $30 billion in revenue last quarter. They are heading towards $120 billion in revenue over the next year. Cloud computing is on the growth path for the foreseeable future.

Scalability is a key driver for cloud migration!

No matter the size of your business, you are always planning to grow. Be it a startup or a successful venture, who doesn’t love to serve more customers, solve more customer problems, and gain profits. Don’t we all get a little starry-eyed when we hear a fairy-tale success story of companies scaling by 200 percent or increasing their team size by a substantial number?

Scalability here refers to the ability to seamlessly enhance or decrease the compute or storage resources.

Smart and effective scaling requires systems, technology that scale easily. There are two types of scaling.

Horizontal scaling, or more popularly referred to as scaling out or in signifies the number of resources. On the other hand, Vertical scaling which is also called scaling up or down refers to the power and capability of individual resources.

Cloud technology makes scaling faster, smarter, and more affordable than on-premises servers (on-prem) – by a big margin. Cloud is better for scalability. With on-premise installations, resources for scaling are finite. Opt for the cloud if you want to grow without major tech hiccups along the way.

Coming to the important part!

Scaling in cloud computing is the process of adding or reducing computing power, storage, and network services to meet the workload needs to match your business needs. For example, you own an Ecommerce store and need additional computing capacity on Black Friday, you need to scale up your server capacity to meet the additional traffic to your website. Similarly, if the need for computing power drops every day from 1 am to 5 am local time, your servers must scale down to use fewer resources, costing less money.

Cloud workloads for computational resources are usually determined by:

Front-end traffic (The number of incoming requests)
Back-end, load-based (The number of jobs queued in the server)
Back-end, time-based (The length of time jobs have waited in the queue)

Scaling Up & Scaling Out …

Scaling up and scaling out refer to two dimensions across which resources can be added. To keep the system running smoothly as the user base grows, you have to add more computing power (CPU, RAM) to your existing machine, that is cloud vertical scaling. Or you have to add more machines/servers, that is cloud horizontal scaling.

Horizontal and vertical scaling in the cloud

Vertical Scaling is the process of resizing a server to give it supplemental CPUs, memory, or network capacity. With only one server to manage, vertical scaling minimizes operational overhead. The need to distribute the workload and coordinate among multiple servers is gone. Vertical scaling is best for applications that are difficult to distribute.

Horizontal scaling splits the workload across multiple servers working in parallel instead of resizing an application to a bigger server. Applications that can sit within a single machine are well-suited to horizontal scaling. There is little need to coordinate tasks between servers. Front-end applications and microservices can leverage horizontal scaling and adjust the number of servers in use according to the workload demand patterns.

Cloud Autoscaling!

Cloud autoscaling is the process of automatically increasing or decreasing the computational resources delivered to a cloud workload. The benefit of autoscaling is simple – your workload gets exactly the cloud computational resources it requires (no more, no less) at the given time. This reflects sin cost as you pay only for resources you need.

All the major public cloud computing vendors offer autoscaling capabilities:

AWS calls the feature Auto Scaling Groups
Google Cloud calls the feature Instance Groups
Microsoft Azure calls it Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Each of these service providers offers the same core capabilities.

If cloud scaling is not done properly, there are risks. When scaling is applied across many workloads, the stakes go high:

Scaling capacity (up or out) beyond actual resource utilization results in overspending on unused infrastructure services. This reflects on cost as well.

Scaling capacity (up or out) creates overspend when demand is low, This puts workload performance at risk when traffic spikes

Well, there is always risk involved when things are done improperly, be it getting a coffee or scaling cloud computing. Right from cloud computing, cloud scaling, or autoscaling, everything is quite simple, not intimidating as it seems.

Galaxy Weblinks has ventured into cloud and security services. With 21 years of experience in IT, we are aware of how deep the waters are. We too are aiming to scale – help more customers with more technologies and solve more problems. Let’s scale together. Contact us for Cloud Migration and other cloud computing services.

Cloud Strategy for Companies in a Post-Pandemic World

Posted on September 27, 2021October 9, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Being an early adopter of new technology can often come at a higher cost than it is worth. As a result, businesses all over the world are slow to embrace digital innovation. Many of us were caught off guard by the pandemic, which forced hundreds of millions of workers to seek shelter and essentially move all operations and most daily life online. Not all businesses had the technological tools they needed to deal with these new challenges.

Pre-Covid-19, for example, most businesses had only just begun their cloud-migration journeys. According to Accenture research from 2019, 90 percent of enterprises have “adopted cloud technology in some form.” On average, these businesses only had 20-40% of their workloads in the cloud.

Even the preliminary steps were significant. Technavio, a market research firm, predicted a 7.1% increase in the cloud migration services market before the pandemic hit ($7.1 billion in 2024). This would imply a compound annual growth rate of 24%.

These figures, however, are expected to skyrocket following the pandemic. According to a study conducted after Covid-19’s impact, 87 percent of “global IT decision-makers” believed Covid-19 would cause organizations to accelerate their cloud migration. Businesses must transform numerous processes and functions within their organization by implementing an integrated cloud strategy and embarking on a transformation journey. A “cloud-first strategy” is formed by combining all of these factors.

Why cloud will continue to explode post-COVID

According to another study conducted by a cloud-native logging and security analytics company, up to 81 percent of organizations reported that COVID-19 had accelerated their cloud timelines. Companies plan to move more than 75% of their apps/workloads to the cloud, up by 200 percent. Eighty-six percent of companies consider cloud options when developing new applications, and more than 40 percent choose the cloud as their first choice.

The reasons are well known by this point. Using public clouds eliminates many of the pandemic risks associated with maintaining your own data center, hardware, network, and software. During quarantine, many companies that were not in the cloud encountered issues.

Public cloud providers remove these problems by making everything virtual. During the pandemic, public cloud service providers demonstrated their dependability as well as their ability to scale up quickly. In light of COVID-19-related problems with on-premises systems and a move to remote work, many businesses moved their processing to the cloud.

Three ways you can get more out of your cloud investments

1. Start Me Up (Once More) – BCP in the Cloud

It may appear overwhelming, but to achieve digital transformation, you must initiate a complete cultural shift. Business Continuity Plan or BCP is one area that must be approached with a fresh perspective.

A cloud-first business that operates with an inflexible BCP created at the beginning of the fiscal year – and then forgotten – is the polar opposite of lean and agile. To aid in the mindset shift, you could even retire the term BCP entirely!

With cloud platforms correctly used, plans for fast failover to backup data centres and data backups on tape are not required in any case. Instead, the objective is to identify the best strategies for providing employees with secure access to everything they need while moving from the office to the train to the home to a coffee shop without missing a beat.

While user business continuity is critical, organizations must also ensure data continuity. AWS and other public cloud providers have this down pat, offering data replication across multiple zones and regions.

2. Shine a Light on Cost-Optimization

It may seem obvious but only invest in cloud projects that will help your company achieve its goals. One of the motivators for many organizations to invest in the cloud is to save money. However, this rarely begins smoothly.

Many businesses experience “bill shock” after migrating to the cloud because they failed to put in place safeguards to prevent enthusiastic overuse of AWS accounts and instances. We’ve also seen large organizations turn off everything in AWS, stifling innovation.

The emphasis here should be on establishing a robust set of controls that do not prevent the use of cloud services but rather set boundaries. You can set up alerts and controls when certain quotas are met, such as when a developer spends £500 on AWS time on an experiment.

3. Engage the Boardroom Beasts

Today, technology is a boardroom issue. However, board members who are cloud illiterate can hinder a company’s ability to succeed. The most effective way to overcome this is to ensure that all board members understand, are involved in, and agree with the cloud journey.

As organizations shifted rapidly to remote working, a significant shift to cloud-based platforms and solutions occurred. Many C-suite executives were also compelled to accelerate their cloud migration plans during this time period. 27.5 percent of IT leaders polled in a recent Cloudreach- sponsored IDC study of 200 IT leaders agreed that large-scale cloud migrations were “essential for business survival” in the future.

Conclusion

The first step in a cloud-first strategy is to identify an optimal cloud strategy and execution plan, which is followed by a secure and cost-effective migration and modernization to the cloud. Using the right expertise and cloud data models, it unlocks existing intelligence and insights, and then reimagines business functions to emerge as a stronger innovation enterprise.

All of these elements must be present for businesses to transition from non-agile and capital-intensive infrastructures to cloud-based innovation platforms that are industry-specific.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software development & testing services. We also offer effective solutions for Cloud support & maintenance to help our global clients with cloud storage, public, private & hybrid application development, among other things. Contact us to speak with our cloud experts.

3 Cloud Problems That Needs Your Attention

Posted on October 21, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

2020 is almost at a close and it would be a safe bet to say that out of all the technologies, Cloud surged the most. Some may believe that they may have figured out the Cloud completely. However, there still are some underlying issues that need to be addressed. Let’s have a look at what needs fixing:

Cost management

Most businesses would agree that cloud providers keep changing their billing practices, adding unwarranted complexity to what is supposed to be a fairly simple thing. When you look at all the possible configurations it’s easy to get lost in the services enlisted in the invoice by your provider. It’s not that just providers are at fault here! Businesses often make several mistakes that can increase their expenses. Sometimes, IT professionals like developers turn on a cloud instance implied to be utilized temporarily and then forget about it later. If you cannot make sense of your bill, what you save on the infrastructure will be lost on bandwidth and other hidden things.

Compliance

Enterprises use the cloud to store all sorts of information, personal and otherwise. With all that information and migration of this information, GDPR compliance poses a challenge. While handling complex cloud environments, there is little time for organizations to worry about the implementation of GDPR. Any breach of the compliance and the business goes under. Add to this mix the fines which can range from 2-4% of the company’s annual revenue, if found violating the law. Many organizations turn to employ a data protection professional who can anticipate data security and privacy according to the needs of the law. These professionals are aware of the compliance needs of the organizations they are employed in, concentrating on the duties for compliance will help organizations fulfill every legal responsibility.

Cloud Security

According to a Unisys-sponsored survey, 64% of U.S. Federal Government IT leaders view identity management solutions as critical to cybersecurity. When we talk about security, we’re just scraping the surface of the cloud concerning what we know about the cloud and how to secure it. Furthermore, the cloud providers do not give us any choices besides using their native security solution the platform comes equipped with. A recipe for a complex system we must add. IAM or Identity Access Management means seamlessly controlling access and rights for every user on the network. Almost every enterprise has IAM best practices in place. However, they are only effective if strictly followed across the organization. Unchecked or mismanaged exceptions and exemptions to IAM policies are some of the leading causes of compromised data. Multifactor authentication is our best bet at securing our clouds and will eventually become ubiquitous.

To Conclude

When compared with the benefits, the cloud limitations seem to get dwarfed. However, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done by both – the services providers as well as the enterprises. Organizations can steer clear of these challenges if they have verified cloud experts by their side to guide them through. Need help with your cloud implementation?? Let us help you. About Galaxy Weblinks Galaxy has a proactive cloud team that works round the clock to deploy and ensure the safety of the systems across various clouds like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Migrating your Legacy Apps to Cloud

Posted on July 30, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Cloud usage has increased by many folds over the past few years. Public clouds have become the goto choice of enterprises for enhanced scalability, disaster recovery, reduced maintenance costs, remote collaboration and flexibility.

Moving your enterprise app and infrastructure to the public cloud instead of making it obsolete and declaring it’s EOL is an efficient decision according to many executives.

The most relevant example in the current scenario is Netflix. Long before Netflix went cloud, it was locked in a struggle with Blockbuster to dominate the video rental market.

Then the Netflix executives saw the opportunity and made two favorable decisions.

First – Moving their online streaming service to cloud.
Second – Without making their legacy app and infrastructure obsolete.

As the benefits were clear when they considered the abilities needed to transform their business model.

As a result, Netflix was among the first companies to go cloud during that time. They spent $40 million in the mid-2000s to build its data centers and pay for the license fees to stream just 1% of their movie catalog.

However, there is uncertainty when it comes to migrating legacy applications to cloud. It’s given that legacy apps have served business over the years very well. There is a lot of data, business algorithms, backend, and frontend architecture here.

But, these on-premise data centres are proving to be expensive in expansions and maintenance terms. And many of these applications run on technology that is outdated with no further updates and any active community support.

Thus stakeholders are pushing towards legacy apps migration to cloud. There are many more reasons which may be specific to your organization like:

Your on premise data centre has reached it maximum storage capacity
You need to scale due to mergers or acquisitions
You are facing security threats
Unanticipated growth in short span of time
New compliance guidelines
Looking to optimize your apps from ground up

If any of the above reasons resonate with you, it’s time to take the call and start migrating your legacy app to cloud. Listed below are the several ways of carrying out this process

Lift and Shift Approach

In this approach, you will be migrating your app without any changes done. It will be a simple, untouched migration, very much like cut-copy-paste strategy. This approach is most suited for apps that have a simplified architecture and thus can be migrated as they are. Any well defined commercial apps or apps having less functionalities can go by this strategy.

Refectoring/Rearchitecting

Many applications are bound to fall in this category. Firstly, legacy apps are built using older frameworks and technologies that have deteriorated to a point where they can not be revived and thus are obsolete. Secondly, once these apps start crashing frequently, developers will eventually have to work harder than usual to find a long term solution.

Prior to migration, these applications are given a makeover which is suitable for uploads on cloud platforms and also simplifies their structure.

They are then written in a way that they don’t fall under the legacy application category any time soon. This is very much similar to when people shift their homes, they discard many household things and make space for advanced, newer items.

When applying this to legacy apps, you will be able to remove redundant information, irrelevant functionalities, etc for making it cloud ready.

Retiring the Legacy App

In some odd scenarios, legacy app optimization for cloud may not fruitful at all. You should think of rebuilding it from scratch instead. This is often because of the fact that designing, developing and deploying a new application will be much more time saving and easier than working on the legacy application.

It can be attributed to functionalities that are no longer required and can be removed. This gives a new perspective and ensures that you will utilize the optimum cloud services and storage facilities. You will be freeing up assets which will be used for your redesigned app.

Outsourcing your migration

External vendors are happy to take this migration task off your hands. They are experts in this and can thus do it more effectively and use less time for the whole process. Your outsourced partners can provide insights into which approach to take from the ones mentioned above.

You can also let them manage your cloud for you. They will take the responsibility of your servers, ensuring that they are up and running at all times. Any security breach can be handled by them within a short duration and even help you in switching cloud service providers in the future.

There is no one size for all approach anyway. You can always use a mix of the strategies mentioned above.

Before you jump into migration, make sure that you take into account the possible obstacles and prepare accordingly. These issues can be related to security troubles, unaccounted costs, little differences in requirements, etc. You should involve all your team members, including designers, testers, engineers before going ahead with the final decision.

We at Galaxy Weblinks work around the clock for giving best services to all clients and managed cloud services is one among them. For any consultation, drop us your contact here and we will get in touch.