3 Ways to Integrate the Cloud Computing into your Business

Cloud computing has become an incredibly popular model for modernizing IT portfolios. With exclusive benefits like gaining agility and speed-to-market, more and more companies are turning to public cloud software.

 

Hybrid cloud systems are a means to shuttle business applications between public clouds from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and private clouds running internally, or even hosted off-site by a provider.

 

Previously, many organizations chose one cloud services provider. Yet, because this approach lacks distinctive functionality, organizations are now recognizing the benefits of multi-cloud. Improved organizational flexibility, better performance and efficiency, and avoiding vendor lock-ins, are just a few of the benefits multi-cloud offers.

 

1. Adopting a Hybrid Cloud Environment

 

One trend that will see continuous traction in 2020 is procuring cloud services from two or more vendors at a time. AWS is popular for customer-facing apps, while Microsoft Azure for business services and GCP for analytics compliment the execution of specific business scenarios.

 

Some chose to hold apps closely using private cloud computing, or, shuttle apps back and forth between public and private systems. This is often in the interest of security or financial reasons, with companies rolling back apps from public clouds to internal systems, known as repatriation.

 

The big picture, however, points to an urgency for a strategy that ensures the entire ecosystem works synchronously, especially as the use of multiple clouds and on-premises cloud installations become more common.

 

2. Find the Right Fit

 

When your eyes are bigger than your stomach, you might put too much food on your plate. This is the case for companies who rely too heavily on the public cloud computing, who often lose money after the first 12-18 months.

 

Over-provisioning resources you won’t consume will ultimately backfire, as is the case with some application developers who accidentally leave cloud workloads running into the weekend. As a result, multi-million-dollar charges are incurred.

 

Governance can help mitigate these over-spending risks. Crafting a strategy that optimizes functionality across cloud computing (both public and private), is one such way to ensure this risk mitigation.

 

 A solution known as “FinOps” is a combination of analytics software and business management practices that, upon migration to the cloud, monitors and calculates the actual rate of cloud consumption.

 

3. Modernize, Migrate, and go Cloud-Native

 

You’re probably familiar with the lift-and-shift approach for migrating apps to the cloud computing, which isn’t enough to drive agility if certain factors aren’t in place. Upgrading legacy applications, for example, is fundamental when moving your data center to the cloud if tackling speed-to-market initiatives.

 

Modernizing apps, whether migrating as-is or re-architecting entirely, is vital for the attainment of competitive, advantageous software. Containers and microservices also work to make apps portable and capable of breaking-down.

 

Cloud-native systems like Kubernetes-esque orchestration services (think AWS, Azure, and GCP) automate deployment, scaling, and management of containers, and ultimately enable rapid-fire change and continuous delivery.

 

Challenging aspects of going cloud-native include the need to manage clusters of containers running in a multi-cloud schema. Stop-gap measures, like using VMware to run virtual servers in AWS or Azure, can help overcome these issues.

 

Irrespective of the architecture your enterprise chooses to build, don’t sacrifice long-term transformation goals your business needs for short-term cost savings.

Moving On-Site Applications to the Cloud

In the past, companies were forced to build and host all of their applications on their servers. This made working on those applications difficult without being on-site and often slowed down their servers for everyone else at the company. Maintaining these closed-circuit servers were expensive and needed constant monitoring. As technology advanced, a better option surfaced: The Cloud. This refers to the Internet servers that millions of databases, software, and applications can run on. Instead of being tied down to one location, these online servers are in places around the world so you can access them wherever you are.

Advantages of Moving Applications to the Cloud

There are a lot of benefits that go with moving software to the Cloud. One, what used to be heavy IT workload can now be automated. Because people can build and update applications on the Cloud, IT does not have to constantly babysit. Instead, adjustments can be made at the click of a button or done automatically. Two, complex acquisitions with very different companies becomes easier. Without being stuck trying to merge different software applications and data by hand, the Cloud can make transitions smoother for both companies.

Although there are many more reasons that we will not dive into here, cloud providers typically utilize a wide variety of security measures to protect its users from threats – most likely much more than one company would invest in on their own. As security threats are ever-changing, this is a nice advantage to better protect your business.

The Downside

While in the long run there are very few disadvantages from keeping your applications on the Cloud, there can be some short-term drawbacks that keep businesses from a leap of faith. The transition process from on-site to on-cloud can be extremely lengthy for your business, especially if you have many large, complex software’s already in place.

You will need to slowly migrate everything onto the Cloud and closely monitor them until your infrastructure has been rebuilt using the new system. This process could take upwards of a year to get everything transitioned over and working properly. Additionally, you will be forced to keep a strong connection online to allow your employees to gain access to your programs once in the Cloud. You should expect a lot of hours spent on testing, retesting, and testing again to ensure the complete functionality of your new Cloud-based programs.

It may seem like quite a few downsides to moving to the Cloud, eventually, it is the right move. You will not be required to spend as much manpower monitoring your in-house servers and applications, and you will be able to use your software’s virtually anywhere in the world. Here at Charter Global, we believe that by utilizing the Cloud, your business can level up and start down the path to even more advances.

Understanding the nature of DevOps, its benefits, and 15 key tools | Charter Global

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development services and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably – using the proper devops tools. This process acceleration enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. It has been proven to increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of software delivery. The goal of DevOps process is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units. In order to have effective DevOps practices, the proper tools must be identified. Outlined below is a basic description of how DevOps works, along with the top 15 tools used in the software development life cycle.

Benefits of DevOps:

DevOps enables continuous software delivery with less complex problems to fix and faster resolution of problems. DevOps tools are used to make a seamless platform for this continuous delivery. It has certainly helped organizations such as Etsy, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google by improving their performance levels significantly.

1. Leverage cloud architecture to control costs
2. Reduced complexity and increased scalability
3. Development and operations teams share access and insight in the development cycle
4. Store and correlate data from different applications and devices
5. Provides a consistent environment from development to production
6. Cloud-based management tools (cloud computing) simplify access and analysis updated in real-time
7. Identify and diagnose issues quickly

Top 15 DevOps Tools:

1. Jenkins:

Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring execution of repeated jobs. This extensible automation engine enables DevOps teams to integrate project changes more easily and access outputs for quickly identifying problems.

2. Chef:

Chef is a DevOps tools for achieving speed, scale, and consistency. Chef turns infrastructure into code so that users easily and quickly can adapt to changing business needs.

3. Puppet:

Puppet strives to build an environment where the software powering everything around us is always available, up-to-date, and accessible from anywhere.

4. SaltStack:

SaltStack is software for data-driven orchestration and configuration management at scale. This DevOps tools is the solution for intelligent orchestration for the software-defined data center.

5. Docker:

Docker is a tool that allows users to quickly assemble apps from components and work collaboratively. This open platform for distributed applications is appropriate for managing containers of an app as a single group and clustering an app’s containers to optimize resources and provide high availability.

6. Ansible:

Ansible is a DevOps tool for automating your entire application life cycle. Ansible is designed for collaboration and makes it much easier for DevOps teams to scale automation, manage complex deployments, and speed productivity.

7. Juju:

Juju is a python based orchestration tool developed by canonical. It has a great UI for orchestrating your applications in your cloud environments. You can also use their command line interface to do all the orchestration tasks. You can configure, deploy and scale applications using Juju.

8. Vagrant:

Vagrant is a great tool for configuring virtual machines for a development environment. Vagrant runs on top of VM solutions like VirtualBox, VMware, and Hyper-V etc. It uses a configuration file called Vagrantfile, which contains all the configurations needed for the VM.

Learn More: https://www.charterglobal.com/do-more-with-devops-top-15-devops-tools/

Charter Global offers a full range of technology services and solutions, including DevOps Services, microservices, and Continuous Delivery. Our Open Source Center of Excellence provides a foundation for continuous innovation.