Designing and Provisioning Workloads: Navigating the Modern Cloud-Based Strategies
Hello everyone, Sonali Deshpande here. I'm a cloud solutions architect at the Gemini India and very thrilled to have this opportunity to speak in this global conference, thanks to the Women Tech Network. Here, I'll be discussing a very pertinent subject in our cloud-first world - the strategizing, designing and provisioning of workloads while exploring avenues for application modernization and business agility.
Understanding The Market
With the pandemic, there has been a substantial elevation in the adoption of cloud-based strategies, owing to their high speed, agility and ability to optimize businesses for cost effectiveness and increased productivity. This has led to a shift in migration strategies towards application modernization and refactoring. The need to standardize and automate the deployment of infrastructure and platform is crucial under these circumstances, paving the way towards leveraging infrastructure as a code or configuration as code libraries.
Today's Enterprises - Cloud Transformation Journey
When an enterprise embarks on their cloud transformation journey, they usually opt for a private cloud strategy, evolving towards a public cloud strategy as the level of confidence and maturity improves. With experience, companies often switch to a multi-cloud strategy or a hybrid model for better cost optimization, vendor neutrality and for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes.
Let's consider the diverse workload types of the enterprises in question - compute workload, web workload, batch workloads and serverless workload. Compute workload comprises of virtual machines for compute memory configurations and different storage services, while web workload consists of integrated databases or storages with app containers.
Achieving End to End Automation
The prime challenge is to build an effective strategy for full automation in the complex scenario of a multi-cloud, multi-tier situation. This involves defining the modernization criteria, understanding the application type and its integration with peripheral systems and making the correct decision on deployment models. The modernization criteria could include performance elasticity, cost reductions, security, high availability, agility improvements, innovations and relative ease of migration.
Mapping Modernization Criteria Across Deployment Models
A suitable example here would be the performance criteria, where infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and container as a service would be effective options. The high availability criteria would be best handled by the infrastructure or platform as a service, since it offers ready availability SLAs.
Reusability and Accelerators
The major cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, provide their own infrastructure as code libraries. However, to standardize the infrastructure, the Terraform tool could be beneficial. Terraform allows for the easy deployment of scripts onto the platforms using DevOps pipelines, ensuring predictable and consistent movement towards building the target state of the application. In addition, it retains the state of the target platform, facilitates cost saving on unusable platforms and enables faster deployments and feature release.
Successful Deployments: Some Examples
For example, in a Platform as a Service scenario for a web application migrating to Azure, the components catalog will be comprised of web app model, MySQL model, active directory and application gateway. Similarly, in a Container as a Service scenario, the components catalog will have Kubernetes for container orchestration, logic apps for serverless workloads and Cosmos DB for as data storage, among others.
Using patterns and component libraries effectively, cloud platforms can be built, providing successful end-to-end automation. Once you have gone through careful planning and followed the outlined pattern, the application becomes ready for cloud migration. Remember, every application is unique and might require slight deviations from the plan, which can be managed accordingly.
That wraps up our session. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. And once again, thanks to the Women Tech Network for making this possible.