What is Cloud Native?

You got Cloud instance and moving your web application to cloud and now it is a Cloud based application. You will get couple of advantages of cloud in this scenarios as well however not all. Cloud Native applications are designed for Cloud considering characteristics and nature of Cloud.

Earlier most of applications were deployed on premise servers. On premise infrastructure is centralized, i.e. everything is in one place, whereas for cloud web servers, databases are distributed. Therefore when you port application from on premise to cloud server, it cannot take complete advantage of the platform as those are monolith applications.

Applications developed with Microservices architecture is bunch of services which work together perfectly taking advantage of distributed infrastructure.

When one architects Cloud Native application, following principles needs to be considered:

• Use Infrastructure as a Service
• Systems to use Microservices Architecture
• Automation
• Containerize
• Orchestrate

Cloud Native approach works well with Continuous delivery to ensure faster time to market. When it comes to scaling, these applications outperform other monolith applications and can scale exponentially.

Cloud native and microservice based applications reduce risks as they are built as small steps or services.

Cloud Native Tools:

As this is a fundamental change in infrastructure, it leads to new toolsets. Legacy tools which were designed to manage tasks for centralize hardware and monolith applications, cannot hold up to Microservices applications and hardware.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation has number of projects like Kubernetes, Fluentd, Prometheusand many more.

To summarize, cloud native architecture is not just developing and deploying applications on cloud instances. It goes much beyond with planning your infrastructure, application development architecture, deployment practices, new toolsets.

Cloud Native is lots of work during initial stages to have faster release cycles at reduced risk throughout application lifetime.

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Revamp or Support Legacy Applications?

Legacy Application Migration

While speaking about multi-billion-dollar businesses, Legacy is considered as wealth, wisdom and status. In terms of software, legacy is often used with negative connotation as software do not get better with time unlike fine wines. Legacy Application Migration, when and how is the decision CIOs needs to give a serious thought.

Enterprises build their systems over the years and it matures with time. This essentially leads to many team members touching the code base, mold the original design to fit current requirements and so on.

Over the period, initial clean code loses its charm and maintaining this new code base becomes a daunting task. At the same time, many new technologies emerge, development tools and practices evolve. However, IT teams cannot change much due to inherent limitations of original architecture and technology stack.

If you are using third party solutions, configurations become tricky over the period and you experience their limitations for fulfilling support requests. At a times, they declare sunset on a product and you are left with no support.

This is the time, IT leaders need to take a crucial call, whether to revamp or continue with existing legacy system.
Here are couple pointers to analyze before making this call.

Business Processes

Often, your business processes/models evolve over time. If your systems are configured for the workflows which were used couple of years back, then this can hamper your team productivity today.

Scale

Your system just does not support the scale of your business today due to its inherent limitations. This will be last thing for any business to have limitation on their business scale due the software which they are using.

User Experience

If your application is slow or difficult to navigate then your users are going to get frustrated. Users of your applications are using so many other software applications, they can sense the difference in performance, responsiveness and usability.

Device Dependency

If your application is hosted on internal servers and cannot be accessed using other devices, this can put restrictions on overall productivity of your users.

Security

Older systems and hardware are more prone to cyber-attacks if appropriate measures are not taken each time.

Support for Automation

Each business is looking to automate certain functions of their businesses to get the competitive advantage. If your system is not built to support it, then it can become a roadblock in your journey for automation.

Integration with other tools

There are many new frameworks or tools which can speed up your delivery or optimize a function, enhance Client experience. If your current system cannot be integrated with it, this can add burden on your other functions.

I hope these pointers can be helpful in your analysis whether to go for Legacy application Migration or not. Please feel free to suggest any additional points to be considered or if you have another perspective to the points mentioned above.

For further discussion, you can also get in touch with me at – rupashri.gulawani@anarsolutions.com

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Container based Deployments or Docker

Container based Deployments or Docker

As of today, there is a substantial drift in the business to move to containers for deploying software applications. The key benefits for this are the elasticity and truncated charge that containers offer. Container based deployments is favoured for Microservices as they are a perfect answer to erratic workloads, allowing finer-grained implementation settings and authorizing application isolation. They have quickly become the preferred approach for managing the build and release of complex applications. Prevalent container technologies for example, Docker allow developer speed by providing a strong setting carefully resembling production, which can be built quickly and in turn offering a lot of benefits.

Not only developers get benefited but also system administrators also get benefited. The benefits can be summed up as follows:

• They offer speedy application deployment, as they minimize the runtime requests of the application, decreasing their magnitude and letting them to be deployed rapidly.
• They also offer portability across machines.
• Consecutive forms of a container can be tracked and differences can be inspected too.
• Also, with the help of a remote repository, the container can be shared with others.
• As the Docker images are very small, this enables quick delivery and decreases the time to deploy new application containers.
• Docker decreases work and threat of glitches with application needs.

With Docker, applications can be run and accomplished alongside.

Conclusion

To sum up, we can say that though container-based deployment offers a lot of benefits still, it is not the best for Microservices for every single deployment. Deployment depends on a lot of constraints. To get the best results, it is mandatory that the containers are selected carefully, as they are entirely based on one’s requirements. Shorter container commencement periods can help upsurge consumer consummation and mend the fiscal performance of profit-making applications.

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Mantra for Successful Azure Migration

To realize the benefits of Azure Migration it’s critical for business and IT leaders to understand the costs, risk factors, and payoffs, and then present a comprehensive business case to the C-suite.

Most Enterprises are moving to the Cloud as a cost-effective means to develop, deploy and manage their infrastructure. A Cloud platform provides competitive advantages such as higher efficiency, greater flexibility, lower costs and better performance of applications to name a few; and Microsoft Azure is one such Cloud platform that offers security, reliability & scalability to an Enterprise.

For industry leaders with significant on-premise IT, the transformation to cloud brings sizable change, in development and operations. Thus, the investment must be justified. And well beyond a ‘follow the crowd’ rationale.

For migration of aging .NET and Windows workloads, finance will certainly question the disruption of these long time and hardworking apps. Microsoft Azure’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS capabilities provides on-demand computing, storage resources, networking, web and mobile app services to accelerate time-to- value. It is ideal for hosting collaboration systems, running big data applications, and migrating on-premise infrastructure.

Azure platform can be effortlessly assimilated with an existing IT environment allowing businesses to take full advantage of their infrastructure on cloud. It offers an ability to use latest technologies in a way that adds greatest value to a business. Whether you are pushing an existing infrastructure to cloud, migrating legacy applications, or deploying business-critical applications on Azure, one needs to carefully plan a migration strategy that best fits their specific requirements.

Here are the steps to ensure a successful cloud migration.

• Determine why you want to move to the cloud – To understand what problems you’ll be solving, you need to understand what the people using the existing platform require. Bring platform owners and users together to get a full understanding of their pain points.
• SWOT analysis – Moving to the cloud is a big undertaking. While it improves your operations, it can be highly disruptive if not done right. Once you’ve identified why you need to move, perform an objective analysis of the benefits AND possible disadvantages of moving to the cloud. The best way to do this is a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
• Assess your environment – The next step is to start with a custom, simple assessment to categorize the applications and workloads. You will get to know the exact amount of work required. There are few tools like Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment Tool and Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit that can help in the assessment. This will lead to effort and time savings, thus avoiding needless frustration as well as costly resource consumption.
• Selecting the right cloud partner – While you may have deep knowledge of your existing infrastructure, architecting for public clouds is relatively new and requires a unique set of skills. Despite your expertise, there will be things that you don’t know and opportunities that may not be obvious to you. Partner with individuals who eat, sleep, and breathe your team’s platform of choice to optimize your outcome.
• Select the cloud environment needed, determine the architecture – Selecting the right environment by checking all the pros and cons, plus the additional sets while choosing the architecture is the key.
• Plan the migration – Coupled with the business case, a strong migration plan covers the technical details of the transition to Azure. This includes architectures, integrations, tools, and training. The plan should cover the technical approach and timelines with design, pilots, testing, and production. Monitoring and management must be considered as well as contingency plans to roll back migrations. The roadmap may also include initial setup and configuration planning with system admins that can ensure the smooth evolution of responsibilities and successful change management.
• Execute (read BACKUP first) – Microsoft Azure handles infrastructure such as servers, storage, networking and virtual machines and managing their operations after migrating as well. An Enterprise can start with a simple application which can be divided into components to migrate to Azure environment. After testing a single component thoroughly, the next part can be moved. This can be continued until all the components or workloads are migrated to Azure. This helps in ensuring minimal to zero application/user disturbance and 100% availability of migrated application. Here are the steps you need to follow for a successful execution
  • Backup Your Data
  • Deployment
  • Migrating the data
  • Testing

• Monitor – Once your migration is completed successfully, it is important to implement monitoring to help identify and fix any issues that might come up with the cloud environment.

To know more and understand the steps in detail write to us at info@anarsolutions.com

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