To address these challenges, companies often turn to zero-trust architecture. Zero Trust is a security model consisting of a set of principles. These principles require all users to be authenticated, authorized, and validated before they are offered access to any data or network. It also advocates access control based on the “never trust, always verify” approach. Because of the result-oriented approach of this strategy, the global zero-trust security market is expected to reach $67.9 billion by 2028. This has the potential to revolutionize the security aspects of shared cloud environments.

In this blog, we will walk you through the various principles of Zero Trust architecture in shared cloud environments. We will also familiarize you with how you can implement Zero Trust in a shared cloud.

The core principles of Zero Trust:

Here is a list of some of the core principles of zero trust:

Continuous verification:Zero Trust allows organizations to continuously authenticate and authorize all the users and devices on the network based on the available data points, including location, device health, user identity, service, workload, data classification, etc. This ensures that all the devices are completely secure. Identity verification also serves as the cornerstone of security. It dictates that organizations should not automatically trust any system or user, whether inside or outside the network.

Least privilege access: This principle dictates that systems and users should always be offered the minimum permission or access required to perform a particular operation. This means limiting access to only what is necessary, reducing the chances of any users acquiring unauthorized access, and drastically reducing the risk of security threats.

Micro-segmentation: Micro-segmentation is a network security strategy that divides a network into smaller, isolated zones. Each segment has its own access controls, enhancing security by limiting unauthorized access and containing potential threats. This approach restricts lateral movement, ensuring that if one segment is compromised, the threat doesn’t easily spread to others.

 Visibility and control: Companies can acquire complete visibility over all their services by opting for zero trust authentication. They also understand the number of privileged accounts associated with each service. They can control the devices allowed to connect to a particular service. Network Access Control (NAC) also regulates connections from devices in various zero trust setups.

Assume breach: The basic practice of zero trust is to assume that the network you are accessing is relatively hostile. This principle points to the fact that external and internal threats are always present in the network until and unless every single threat is ruled out. This will help ensure that the necessary steps are taken to remediate the vulnerabilities in the network.

Implementing Zero Trust in shared clouds:

Implementing a secure zero trust strategy for your shared cloud environment requires several steps. Here’s a quick glance at what those steps are:

Identifying the assets: First, defining the cloud assets and data in the environment becomes necessary. This involves identifying the cloud resources, like databases, servers, storage, applications, etc., and classifying them based on various factors. It is also important to analyze the sensitivity of the data and apply encryption and backup policies accordingly.

Segmenting the network:Segmenting and isolating the cloud network forms an important part of the zero trust implementation process. It isolates the cloud network into smaller segments like microservices, virtual private clouds, and services. This helps in better regulation of traffic between the different components of the network; it also limits lateral movements in case there is a breach.

Applying security policies: The next step is to define and enforce various security policies on the assets. The policies will specify who can access what, where, when, and how in a shared cloud environment. You can also use powerful Identity and Access Management (IAM) methods like Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to implement role-based access control on the systems. 

Automating and updating the security processes: The last step would be to automate and update the various security processes in the environment, like scanning, patching, testing, and remediation. This has a critical role to play in securing the shared cloud environment. You will also be able to remain compliant with industrial rules and regulations.

Overall, implementing a zero-trust strategy for a shared cloud environment is an ongoing process. It requires regular renewal of the security policies to remain updated with the changing threats. By adopting a zero-trust policy, companies can improve the resilience of their shared cloud environment and carry out their business operations in a streamlined way. 

Applying security controls and policies in a Zero Trust network:

At the center of the Zero Trust architecture lies a security enforcement policy. All the identities, devices, networks, applications, and infrastructure components of an organization need to be configured with the appropriate security policies. The policies should also be configured so that the devices remain coordinated with the overall Zero Trust strategy of the organization.

For example, device policies can be used to determine the exact criteria for healthy devices, while conditional access policies allow healthy devices to access certain networks and applications. These policies also impact empowerment, employee, and customer engagement models and reduce the chances of data breaches.

Nowadays, companies worldwide are trying to embrace a zero-trust approach to facilitate remote work over a shared cloud network and digitally transform their business operations. Zero Trust principles can be used to establish security principles while maintaining flexibility to be on par with the fast-paced world.

Many companies implement Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) solutions as a part of their Zero Trust strategy to dynamically create secure, micro-segmented connections for users and devices, reducing the chances of security threats. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can also strengthen the boundaries of shared cloud environments.

The importance of monitoring and auditing in the successful implementation of Zero Trusts:

Monitoring and auditing the various cloud activities and behaviors is a vital step towards maintaining the security of the shared cloud environment. This step involves collecting and analyzing the various logs and metrics to improve the visibility of the different operations of the cloud environment.

Through rigorous governance, the cloud activities offers insight into the performance of the various assets. Utilizing highly advanced monitoring tools like User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) can be used to detect any suspicious activities or anomalies in the cloud environment.

Continuously monitoring the security boundaries of an organization using Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions can also help identify vulnerabilities, outdated software, or signs of compromise on devices.

Securing the Future with Indium Software’s Zero Trust Solutions:

Now, you can streamline your Zero Trust journey amid all your business operations with Indium Software. By choosing Indium Software as your Zero Trust implementation partner, you can ensure that all your assets and endpoints meet the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) requirements.  The experts at Indium Software will help you deploy tools and techniques to manage the security aspects of your shared cloud environment dynamically.

You can instantly change and monitor access policies while allowing your business operations to run smoothly. Zero Trust also provides you the scope to collect, analyze, and correlate information about the state of the different assets in your environment in real time. So, if you are willing to revamp your security strategy, contact the experts at Indium Software and avail of their services.

Conclusion:

As companies have increased their reliance on shared cloud setups, it has become imperative for organizations to implement a zero-trust strategy in their workplace environment. The “never trust, always verify” approach, coupled with robust identity and access management, network segmentation, security control, and continuous monitoring, provides a strong foundation for securing shared cloud services. By implementing Zero Trust, you will be able to safeguard your critical assets and manage the boundaries of your shared cloud environment much better.

The post Zero Trust Architecture in Shared Cloud Environments appeared first on Indium.

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development and operations, new methodologies and practices constantly emerge. One such paradigm that has been gaining tremendous prominence is GitOps. GitOps brings together the power of version control and declarative infrastructure management to streamline software delivery and operational efficiency. This blog explores why GitOps has become a game-changer for organizations and how it revolutionizes the software development lifecycle.

GitOps drives a new era in software operations

Before delving into the world of GitOps, it’s essential to comprehend the traditional approach to software delivery. Traditionally, development and operations teams have worked independently, often leading to a lack of synchronization, longer release cycles, and higher error rates. This traditional siloed approach creates challenges for maintaining version control, collaboration, and reproducibility.

GitOps fundamentally aims to bridge the gap between development and operations by leveraging Git as a single source of truth for the entire software delivery process. With GitOps, organizations can ensure a declarative and auditable infrastructure by representing the desired state of the system in version-controlled repositories.

Key principles – GitOps workflows in action

GitOps is built upon a set of core principles that guide its implementation. These principles include declarative infrastructure, version control, reconciliation, and automated deployments. By adopting these principles, organizations can achieve reliable and predictable software delivery, reduce the risk of manual errors, and enable faster rollbacks.

The GitOps workflow revolves around a pull-based model where the desired state of the system is described in Git. The workflow involves the creation of infrastructure as code, Git-based version control, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, and automated reconciliation of the system’s actual state with the desired state. This ensures that the system is always in the desired state, minimizing manual intervention.

GitOps adoption benefits

1. 1. Teams’ collaboration and version control: GitOps fosters collaboration between development and operations teams, promoting transparency and accountability. Version control ensures that all changes to the system are tracked, making it easier to roll back to a previous known state, if necessary.
2. 2. High visibility and traceability: With GitOps, organizations gain visibility into the entire software delivery process, allowing them to trace the history of changes made to the system. This enables easier troubleshooting, compliance audits, and accountability.
3. 3. Consistent environments and faster rollbacks: By enforcing a declarative infrastructure through GitOps, organizations can ensure consistent environments across different stages of the software development lifecycle. In case of issues or failures, GitOps allows for faster rollbacks to a known working state, minimizing downtime.
4. 4. Increased security and compliance: GitOps enhances security by enforcing access controls and providing an auditable trail of changes. Compliance requirements can be easily met by leveraging the version-controlled nature of GitOps.

GitOps vs. DevOps: Are they mutually exclusive?

GitOps is often perceived as an alternative to DevOps, but in reality, they are complementary. While DevOps focuses on the cultural and organizational aspects of software delivery, GitOps provides a framework for implementing DevOps principles effectively. GitOps leverages version control, automation, and infrastructure as code, which are essential components of a successful DevOps implementation.

GitOps tools and ecosystem

Several tools and platforms have emerged to support GitOps practices. Some prominent examples include:

1. Flux

Flux is one of the pioneering GitOps tools. It continuously monitors the Git repository for changes and automatically reconciles the cluster’s state to match the desired state defined in the repository. It does so by leveraging Kubernetes controllers and operators to apply the necessary changes to the infrastructure, ensuring that the actual state aligns with the specified configuration.

Flux embraces the principles of declarative infrastructure management, making it a powerful tool for maintaining system consistency and minimizing manual intervention. By relying on Git as the single source of truth, Flux enables teams to have version-controlled infrastructure configurations, which not only facilitate collaboration but also ensure traceability and reproducibility.

In addition to its core functionality, Flux offers several features that enhance its usability and flexibility. It provides integration with various Git hosting providers, such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, allowing teams to leverage their preferred version control platform. Flux also supports multi-tenancy, enabling organizations to manage multiple clusters and environments efficiently.

Furthermore, Flux supports automated image updates, which allows for seamless continuous delivery of containerized applications. It can automatically detect new container image versions in the registry and update the deployment manifests accordingly, triggering a rolling update of the application.
Flux’s extensibility is another valuable aspect, as it allows the integration of custom operators and controllers to tailor the reconciliation process to specific requirements. This flexibility enables organizations to adapt Flux to their unique needs and incorporate additional automation and validation steps as desired.

2. Argo CD

Argo CD is a declarative GitOps tool specifically designed for Kubernetes environments. It serves as a powerful solution for managing application deployments and configuration updates, ensuring that the desired state defined in the Git repository is effectively synchronized with the running cluster.
Argo CD provides a simple and intuitive web-based interface that allows users to visualize and manage the state of applications deployed in Kubernetes. With its user-friendly dashboard, teams can easily track the status of deployments, monitor synchronization processes, and gain insights into the overall health of their applications.

One of the key strengths of Argo CD is its declarative nature. It leverages Kubernetes manifests stored in a Git repository as the source of truth for application configurations. By adopting a declarative approach, Argo CD ensures that the actual state of the cluster aligns with the desired state defined in the Git repository. This approach not only enhances reproducibility and traceability but also simplifies the management of application configurations.
Argo CD’s continuous synchronization capabilities are a standout feature. It automatically detects changes in the Git repository and initiates the reconciliation process to bring the cluster’s state in line with the desired state. This automatic synchronization reduces the need for manual interventions and enables faster and more efficient updates to the system.

Moreover, Argo CD supports application rollbacks, which can be crucial in scenarios where issues or bugs arise after a deployment. With its version-controlled approach, Argo CD allows teams to easily roll back to a previous known working state, mitigating risks and minimizing downtime.
Argo CD’s extensibility is another notable aspect. It provides an ecosystem of plugins and extensions that can be leveraged to customize and enhance its functionality. This extensibility allows teams to integrate Argo CD seamlessly into their existing workflows and adapt it to their specific requirements.

3. Jenkins X

Jenkins X is an opinionated implementation of GitOps specifically designed for cloud-native applications. It brings together the power of Jenkins, Kubernetes, and GitOps principles to automate the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling fast and reliable application delivery in cloud-native environments.

At its core, Jenkins X follows a GitOps-driven approach for managing the entire CI/CD process. It leverages Git as the source of truth for defining and version-controlling pipelines, configurations, and deployment manifests. By storing these artifacts in Git repositories, Jenkins X ensures that the entire software delivery process is transparent, auditable, and reproducible.

One of the key strengths of Jenkins X is its opinionated nature. It provides a predefined set of best practices, tools, and workflows that guide teams through the CI/CD process, reducing the complexity and time required to set up pipelines for cloud-native applications. Jenkins X’s opinionated approach allows organizations to quickly adopt industry-standard CI/CD practices without the need for extensive configuration and customization.

Jenkins X seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes, leveraging its orchestration capabilities to provision and manage build agents, environments, and deployments. It automatically creates isolated namespaces for each application, facilitating isolation and ensuring that applications are deployed consistently across environments.

With Jenkins X, developers can easily trigger pipeline executions by simply pushing their code changes to the Git repository. Jenkins X then automatically builds, tests, and deploys the application using the defined pipeline configuration. This automated process not only reduces manual effort but also ensures consistent and reliable application deployments.

Furthermore, Jenkins X embraces the principles of progressive delivery, enabling teams to adopt strategies such as canary deployments, blue/green deployments, and automated rollbacks. These progressive delivery techniques enhance application resilience and allow for seamless updates with minimal disruption.

Jenkins X also provides a rich set of additional features, including built-in support for code reviews, issue tracking, and collaboration. It integrates with popular developer tools and services, such as GitHub, Jira, and Slack, to streamline the development workflow and improve team communication and productivity.

Overcome challenges with a successful implementation partner—Indium

While GitOps offers numerous advantages, implementing it effectively requires careful consideration of various factors. Some challenges include managing infrastructure drift, ensuring secure access controls, and handling complex application dependencies.

Partnering with Indium brings the advantage of their decades of experience in handling DevOps projects across different industries. Their expertise and knowledge gained from successfully delivering various DevOps initiatives can provide valuable insights and guidance throughout your GitOps journey. They can offer tailored solutions, recommend best practices, and assist in implementing efficient workflows that align with your specific requirements and industry standards. Organizations must also invest in training and cultural changes to foster collaboration and embrace the GitOps mindset.

The future of GitOps

As organizations continue to embrace cloud-native technologies and adopt Kubernetes, GitOps is expected to gain even more prominence. The ecosystem around GitOps is rapidly evolving, with new tools, best practices, and standards. GitOps has the potential to become the de facto approach for managing cloud-native infrastructure and software delivery in the future.

The post Embracing the GitOps paradigm: Leveraging tools and ecosystems for success appeared first on Indium.

The Need for Cloud Optimization

The cloud has become critical for businesses today due to many factors.

• It enables centralizing operations management at lower costs with greater visibility into processes.
• It helps expand markets faster and with lower investments.
• It facilitates end-to-end management of workflows.
• It facilitates easy communication and collaboration between stakeholders.
• Technologies such as data, analytics, AI/ML, and IOT that leverage the cloud have further improved productivity, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

However, the cloud can be like a leaky bucket. Along with its many benefits, it can be complex and requires an understanding of the multiple aspects that impact cloud infrastructure such as services, usage patterns, and pricing models. A lack of visibility into cloud costs can make it challenging for organizations to identify opportunities for saving costs and optimizing resource utilization.

To be able to leverage the benefits provided by the cloud infrastructure, it is important to make it more effective. Improving the delivery, optimization, and performance of IT services and workloads in the cloud environment requires best practices, procedures, and management of the cloud strategy. It requires cloud operations management or CloudOps to bring together people, processes, and technologies to execute the cloud strategy.

Some of the key pillars of a well-managed cloud infrastructure include:

• The governance layer facilitating the implementation of procedures and policies correctly for greater efficiency and lowers costs
• The framework layers such as the cloud application layer and the cloud operations layer helping the organization manage deployment, monitoring of applications, and operation of cloud services
• The security layer facilitating vulnerability and threat management and workload protection, and integrating with the company’s larger cybersecurity management function

Together, these layers form the foundation for CloudOps to improve application delivery on the cloud covering the following five aspects:

• Building
• Deploying
• Operating
• Monitoring
• Managing

This can help improve cloud adoption and usage in the organization, thereby increasing the return on investments and making them more agile. It can help businesses overcome hurdles for building capabilities for innovation and reducing the time to market while keeping their costs low. It also helps improve security and compliance.

The benefits of CloudOps can be summarized as:

• Optimization of Costs: Improved management of costs with CloudOps helps with cloud spend optimization, reducing wastage, and improving efficiency.
• Resource Allocation: Cost optimization improves budgetary planning and resource allocation for future needs.
• Risk Management: Identification of potential risks such as budget overruns, resource underutilization, and other cost management issues, and implementation of measures to mitigate the risks.

CloudOps Best Practices for Cost and Workload Management

Cloud operations or CloudOps uses continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), a DevOps principle, to improve availability and optimize business processes running on the cloud. The key aspects include configuration management, optimization of performance capacity, resource allocation, ensuring compliance, and facilitating the fulfillment of service-level agreements.

For CloudOps to be effective, it requires the following four pillars to be in place. They are:

Policy: Creating and enforcing policies to govern the usage of resources by users and applications is critical to improving the return on investment.

Abstraction: Management of the cloud must be decoupled from infrastructure to enable centralized management of cloud machine and storage instances, security, network, and governance using a single window.

Provisioning: Provisioning can be of two types – self or automated. Cloud users can allocate their own machines in self-provisioning and track usage. Automated provisioning is more efficient, allowing applications to request resources as needed and deprovision when not needed.

Automation: Automating processes such as provisioning, user and security management, and management of application program interface using AI/ML improve the efficiency of the cloud infrastructure.

To improve the cost-effectiveness and workload management of cloud infrastructure, CloudOps enables businesses to

• Have a clearly defined cost management strategy aligned with business goals.
• Monitor and analyze cloud costs using dashboards, reports, and cost management tools.
• Improve resource utilization by resizing or decommissioning underutilized resources.
• Empower employees with training and tools to create awareness about costs, track usage, and take responsibility to optimize resource utilization for improved ROI.

Making CloudOps Effective with Indium Software

Cloud optimization can be challenging due to the complex nature of cloud infrastructure and the lack of visibility into cloud pricing policies. This can lead to resources being underutilized and costs running high.

Indium Software is a cutting-edge solution provider that can help businesses improve cloud optimization by deploying a CloudOps strategy that overcomes the challenges and improves the ROI of cloud migration, modernization, cloud solution architecture, and so on. We help businesses understand their resource needs and utilization, identify opportunities for improvement, and implement bespoke solutions to meet cost and resource optimization goals.

There are several tools and technologies available to help businesses with monitoring and tracking cloud usage and managing cloud resources. The Indium team of cloud experts assesses the needs and deploys the best-fit solutions to help organizations meet their business goals and leverage cloud resources in a cost-effective manner. Our experience in DevOps and Cloud makes us well-suited to help businesses on their journey to becoming agile and breaking barriers to innovation.

FAQs

The post Why is Cloud Optimization for Cost & Workload Management Critical? appeared first on Indium.

For this, applications are developed on cloud infrastructure using modern tools and techniques. Using cloud-native technologies benefits businesses as they enable quick and frequent changes to applications without affecting service delivery, this helps businesses break barriers to innovation and improve their competitive advantage.

For cloud-native applications to be effective and deliver on their promise, it is important to plan the right cloud architecture and document the cloud engineering strategy so the apps can be scalable, flexible, and resilient.

Why Enterprises are Building Cloud Native Applications?

The availability of digital technologies such as cloud, AI/ML, and IoT are transforming the way businesses operate today. Increased access to data is seeing a corresponding increase in the need for storage and computing power. Traditional, on-prem systems cannot cope with this pace of change and the investment can be formidable.

By modernizing their application and migrating to the cloud, businesses can reap many benefits. But, modernizing goes beyond mere migration of apps. Some or most apps must be made cloud-native to provide the intended benefits, which include:

• Improved Efficiency: Cloud-native applications are developed using the agile approach including DevOps and continuous delivery. Scalable applications are being built using cloud services, automated tools, and modern design culture.
• Lower Cost: The cost of infrastructure is drastically reduced when businesses opt for the cloud-native approach as they share resources and pay only peruse.
• High Availability: Building robust and highly accessible applications is made possible by cloud-native technology. In order to give customers a great experience, feature updates don’t result in app downtime, and businesses can scale up app resources during busy times of year.
• Flexibility, Scalability, and Resilience: The traditional apps are called monolithic because they are a single block structure composed of all the required functionalities. Any upgradation can be disruptive and needs changes to be made across the block, making them more rigid and hard to scale. Cloud-native applications, on the other hand, are made up of several small, interdependent functionalities called microservices. As a result, changes can be made to the different units without affecting the rest of the software, making them more resilient, flexible, and scalable.
• Easier Management: Cloud Native architecture and development are containerized and utilize cloud services by default. It is often called serverless and tends to reduce infrastructure management.

Cloud Native Architecture: Designed for Scale

Cloud-native architecture is designed such that it is easy to maintain, cost-effective, and self-healing. It does not depend on physical servers, hence called serverless technology, and provides greater flexibility.

APIs are needed for the cloud-native microservices to communicate with each other using an event-driven architecture for enhanced performance of every application. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is an open-source platform that facilitates cloud-native development with support for projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

The cloud-native architecture typically consists of:

• Immutable Infrastructure: The servers hosting cloud-native applications do not change even after the deployment of an application. In case additional computing resources are needed, the app is migrated to a new, high-performance server, and does not require a manual upgrade.
• Loosely-Coupled Microservices: The different functionalities available as microservices are loosely coupled – that is, they are not integrated as in a monolith, and remain independent of each other, only communicating when needed. This allows changes to be made to individual applications without affecting the overall performance of the software.
• Application Programming Interface (API): Microservices communicate with each other using APIs and state what data a microservice requires to deliver a particular result.
• Service Mesh: The communication between the different microservices is managed by a software layer called the service mesh in the cloud infrastructure. This can also be used for adding more functions without the need to write new code.
• Containerized Microservices: The microservice code and other required files, such as  resource files, libraries, and scripts, are packed in containers, which are the smallest compute unit in the cloud-native application. As a result, cloud-native applications can run independently of the underlying operating system and hardware, allowing them to be run from on-premise infrastructure or on the cloud, including hybrid clouds.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Small, frequent changes are made to the software to improve its efficiency and identify and troubleshoot errors quickly. This improves the quality of the code on an ongoing basis. CD makes the microservices always ready to be deployed to the cloud as and when needed. Together, the two make software delivery efficient.

Overcoming Cloud-Native Development Challenges

Despite the many advantages and ease of development and maintenance of cloud-native applications, it is not without challenges. As the business expands, so can the number of microservices, requiring more oversight and maintenance. It requires strong integrators, APIs, and the right tools for improved management of asynchronous operations. Ensuring that each integrates well with the overall system and performs as expected is critical. Further, regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) make security and governance critical for compliance.

These challenges make comprehensive testing and quality assurance essential. Therefore, a good cloud-native app development approach should include:

• Assessing the needs: A good understanding of the required functionality is essential to start from scratch or modernize existing apps. Building cloud-native apps from the ground up may be more beneficial even for businesses that are modernizing so that they can leverage the advantages better.
• Designing the architecture: Right from the cloud model to use to whether to build from scratch or repurpose are some of the many decisions that need to be taken at this stage. This will influence the nature of the technical stack the business should opt for.
• Security and Governance: While the cloud service provider may have their own security protocols for the servers, each organization must have its own governance policy and implement security to protect data and ensure compliance.
• Testing and QA: Testing each microservice individually and as a composite unit is critical to ensure performance and customer satisfaction.

FAQs

The post Cloud-Native Engineering: A Guide to Building Modern Applications appeared first on Indium.

For cloud deployment, Mendix apps are packaged and deployed to a preferred deployment option with one-click deployment, making it one of the most efficient low-code solutions. However, whether you want to deploy and run your Mendix apps on traditional virtual servers, cloud, or hybrid environments, Mendix has got your back. Let’s dive deeper into the details of each Mendix deployment option.

On-Premises Deployment

On-premise deployment involves installing and running applications on servers hosted by the company with its data centers or physical servers. One main advantage of this deployment option is that it guarantees 100% control over the app and related data, including compliance and security requirements. This deployment option requires the company to have IT infrastructure and resources to manage and maintain the servers.

Mendix enables you to deploy apps on-premises with Unix-Like and Microsoft Windows deployment options. However, you must design the architecture of your server to ensure Mendix apps run smoothly. When designing the server architecture, you can set up your deployment environment in multiple ways.

Fortunately, there is no right or wrong server configuration option. It depends on your company’s performance, availability, and security requirements. Here are four commonly adopted server architecture setups for on-premises Mendix app deployment.

Minimal Server Architecture

This setup is the easiest solution and has the fewest connection and configuration problems. It is also used in the Mendix cloud, except that cloud is based on Linux, with NGINX used rather than IIS and PostgreSQL utilized as the database server.

Different Database Server and a Different Web Server

This server architecture setup is the most challenging to maintain. Every update must be conducted twice (once on the app server as normal, and secondly as an update in which you must copy and paste all the static content to the web server). This implies that you must copy the contents in your web folder, including the MxClientSystem, to the web server each time you update.

We recommend you avoid this server architecture setup if possible.

The other two options include:

• Hosting with a discrete database server, and
• Discrete Mendix Web Server in a DMZ

Cloud Deployment

Cloud deployment involves hosting an app on a third-party cloud provider, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). This deployment option is often preferred due to its reliability, flexibility, scalability, and minimal infrastructure requirements. Also, it is cost-friendly and enables you to deploy apps faster.

What’s more, cloud deployment is suitable for companies with geographically dispersed user bases. It allows access to the app from anywhere worldwide as long as the user has an internet connection.

How Mendix Supports Cloud Deployment

Applications built with Mendix are cloud-native-based and conform to twelve-factor application principles. Also, the Mendix Runtime is entirely optimized to run in the container technology compatible with most advanced cloud platform offerings, such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Therefore, Mendix applications can utilize the advantages of these cloud solutions, including auto-healing, CI/CD, cloud interoperability, auto-provisioning, auto-scaling, and low infrastructure overhead.

With this scalable and flexible deployment option, Mendix supports various deployment choices enabling you to run Mendix apps on public, private, hybrid, virtual private, multi-cloud, or through a conventional virtual server.

Deploying Mendix Applications in Public Cloud

This cloud deployment option helps you attain the best utilization rate for your IT infrastructure. It helps transform your capital investment into operational expenses while maintaining optimal flexibility. Mendix supports most public cloud vendors, including:

• Microsoft Azure
• GCP
• AWS
• SAP cloud platform
• IBM
• Red Hat OpenShift

For public cloud service providers that support Cloud Foundry, such as IBM, SAP, and Mendix cloud, Mendix delivers a fully integrated experience, enabling you to deploy apps to your choice of cloud with a single click.

Deploying Mendix Applications in Private Cloud

If your business is complying with specific regulations or cannot run in third-party cloud service providers, private cloud would be an ideal choice for deploying your Mendix apps. Mendix can run on a server-based solution as a private cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Deploying Mendix Applications in Virtual Private Cloud

If your company requires a higher application or data isolation level, the virtual private cloud would be an ideal cloud deployment choice. It lets you benefit from a high resource flexibility and utilization rate within a discrete network segment or on dedicated hardware. This cloud deployment option allows your Mendix apps to be fully decoupled from the public Mendix Developer Portal, implying that operating on a VPC is easily accommodated.

Hybrid Deployment

Hybrid deployment combines on-premise and cloud deployment. This Mendix application deployment option lets you experience the best of both worlds by offering the flexibility to run specific application components on-premises while leveraging cloud services for other application parts.

This deployment option is helpful when you want complete control over specific parts of the app while enjoying the benefits of cloud services for the rest of the application.

Which Deployment Option is Best for Deploying Mendix Applications?

Each deployment option has its pros and cons. For instance, while deploying Mendix apps on-premises gives you 100% control over your app, it can be costly and limit your flexibility. On the other hand, cloud deployment lets you enjoy flexibility, but it limits your control over the application. Therefore, it depends explicitly on your business requirements and goals. However, the hybrid deployment option lets you enjoy the benefits of both deployment options.

Final Thoughts

Mendix provides many deployment options, from on-premise and cloud to hybrid. You need to assess your business requirements to determine which deployment option suits your Mendix application. Doing helps you choose a deployment option with the most benefits and minimal limitations.

The post Deploying Mendix Applications On-Premises, Cloud, or Hybrid appeared first on Indium.

What is Securing a multi-account AWS environment?

Securing a multi-account AWS environment is a critical aspect of cloud engineering services as it helps ensure the safety and privacy of the data and resources hosted on AWS. A multi-account environment refers to the use of multiple AWS accounts to isolate different environments, such as development, testing, and production, to reduce the risk of accidental resource modification or deletion.

Securing a multi-account AWS environment involves implementing various security controls, such as:

• Identity and Access Management (IAM) – Implementing IAM best practices, such as the principle of least privilege, to limit access to AWS resources to only authorized users and services.

• Network Security – Implementing network security controls such as security groups, network ACLs, and VPCs to control the ingress and egress traffic between resources and the internet.

• Encryption – Using encryption for data at rest and in transit, and implementing AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage encryption keys.

• Monitoring and Logging – Implementing a centralized logging and monitoring solution to track and identify any unusual activities and events.

• Security Automation – Using AWS security automation tools such as AWS Config, AWS Security Hub, and AWS GuardDuty to detect and remediate security threats in real-time.

• Compliance – Ensuring that the AWS environment is compliant with industry-specific regulations and standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR.

By implementing these security controls, a multi-account AWS environment can be better protected against security threats and data breaches, enabling cloud engineering services to operate in a secure and reliable manner.

Also read:  Looking forward to maximizing ROI from Cloud Migration? Here’s how, why and when to do it.

Problem Statement

As a cloud services provider, the top 3 inquiries from large enterprises with workloads running on AWS are:

• How can I secure my multi-account AWS environment?
• How can we make sure that all accounts are complying with compliance and auditing requirements?
• How can we complete this quickly, all at once, rather than in pieces?

Even though large organisations with numerous AWS accounts have guidelines for new AWS implementations, managing and monitoring all the accounts at once is inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to security risks.

Solution

AWS Control Tower is the best solution to provision, manage, govern, and secure a multi-AWS account environment, even though there are more traditional methods of securing AWS environments using AWS IAM, Service Catalog, Config, and AWS Organizations.

Using pre-approved account configurations, Control Tower’s Account factory automates the provisioning of new AWS accounts. A landing zone that is based on best-practices blueprints is automatically created by the control tower, and guardrails are used to enable governance. The landing zone is a multi-account baseline with sound architecture that adheres to the AWS well-architected framework. Guardrails put governance regulations for operations, compliance, and security into effect.

Organizations can use Control Tower to:

• Easily create well-designed multi-account environments; and provide federated access using AWS SSO.
• Use VPC to implement network configurations.
• Create workflows for creating accounts using AWS Service Catalog
• Ensure adherence to guardrails-set rules.
• Detect security vulnerabilities automatically.

Benefits

• Beneficial for continuously growing enterprises, where there will be new additions to AWS accounts progressively.
• Helpful for large businesses with a diverse mix of engineering, operations, and development teams
• Gives a step-by-step process to customise the build and automate the creation of an AWS Landing Zone
• Prevents the use of resources in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s policies.
• Guardrails are a high-level rule in Control Tower’s AWS Config rules and helps detecting non-conformance with previously provisioned resources.
• Provides a dashboard for quick access to provisioned accounts and reports on the detective and preventive guardrails that are activated on your accounts.
• Compliance Reports detailing any resources that violate policies that have been enabled by guardrails.

In conclusion, securing a multi-account AWS environment is crucial for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your organization’s data and resources. By implementing proper security measures such as access controls, monitoring, and automation, you can significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and data loss.

Indium Software’s expertise in AWS security can help organizations to design and implement a comprehensive security strategy that meets their specific needs and requirements. Their team of experts can help with security assessments, audits, and ongoing monitoring to ensure that your AWS environment is continuously protected from security threats.

The post How to Secure an AWS Environment with Multiple Accounts  appeared first on Indium.

Often, the data team needs different solutions to process unstructured data, enable business intelligence, and build machine learning models. But with the unified Databricks Lakehouse Platform, all these are unified. It also simplifies data processing, analysis, storage, governance, and serving, enabling data engineers, analysts, and data scientists to collaborate effectively.

For the cloud engineer, this is good news. Managing permissions, networking, and security becomes easier as they only have one platform to manage and monitor the security groups and identity and access management (IAM) permissions.

Challenges Faced by Cloud Engineers

Access to data, reliability, and quality, are key for businesses to be able to leverage the data and make instant and informed decisions. Often, though, businesses face the challenge of:

• No ACID transactions: As a result, updates, appends, and reads cannot be mixed
• No Schema Enforcement: Leads to data inconsistency and low quality.
• Integration with Data Catalog Not Possible: Absence of single source of truth and dark data.

Since object storage is used by data lakes, data is stored in immutable files that can lead to:

• Poor Partitioning: Ineffective partitioning leads to long development hours for improving read/write performance and the possibility of human errors.

• Challenges to Appending Data: As transactions are not supported, new data can be appended only by adding small files, which can lead to poor quality of query performance.

Databricks Advantages

Databricks helps overcome these problems with Delta Lake and Photon.

Delta Lake: A file-based, open-source storage format that runs on top of existing data lakes, it is compatible with Apache Spark and other processing engines and facilitates ACID transactions and handling of scalable metadata, unifying streaming and batch processing.

Delta Tables, based on Apache Parquet, is used by many organizations and is therefore interchangeable with other Parquet tables. Semi-structured and unstructured data can also be processed by Delta Tables, which makes data management easy by allowing versioning, reliability, time travel, and metadata management.

It ensures:

• ACID
• Handling of scalable data and metadata
• Audit history and time travel
• Enforcement and evolution of schema
• Supporting deletes, updates, and merges
• Unification of streaming and batch

Photon: The lakehouse paradigm is becoming de facto but creating the challenge of the underlying query execution engine unable to access and process structured and unstructured data. What is needed is an execution engine that has the performance of a data warehouse and is scalable like the data lakes.

Photon, the next-generation query engine on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, fills this need. As it is compatible with Spark APIs, it provides a generic execution framework enabling efficient data processing. It lowers infrastructure costs while accelerating all use cases, including data ingestion, ETL, streaming, data science, and interactive queries. As it does not need code change or lock-in, just turn it on to get started.

Read more on how Indium can help you: Building Reliable Data Pipelines Using DataBricks’ Delta Live Tables

Databricks Architecture

The Databricks architecture facilitates cross-functional teams to collaborate securely by offering two main components: the control plane and the data plane. As a result, the data teams can run their processes on the data plane without worrying about the backend services, which are managed by the control plane component.

The control plane consists of backend services such as notebook commands and workspace-related configurations. These are encrypted at rest. The compute resources for notebooks, jobs, and classic SQL data warehouses reside on the data plane and are activated within the cloud environment.

For the cloud engineer, this architecture provides the following benefits:

Eliminate Data Silos

A unified approach eliminates the data silos and simplifies the modern data stack for a variety of uses. Being built on open source and open standards, it is flexible. Enabling a unified approach to data management, security, and governance improves efficiency and faster innovation.

Easy Adoption for A Variety of Use Cases

The only limit to using the Databricks architecture for different requirements of the team is whether the cluster in the private subnet has permission to access the destination. One way to enable it is using VPC peering between the VPCs or potentially using a transit gateway between the accounts.

Flexible Deployment

Databricks workspace deployment typically comes with two parts:

– The mandatory AWS resources

– The API that enables registering those resources in the control plane of Databricks

This empowers the cloud engineering team to deploy the AWS resources in a manner best suited to the business goals of the organization. The APIs facilitate access to the resources as needed.

Cloud Monitoring

The Databricks architecture also enables the extensive monitoring of the cloud resources. This helps cloud engineers track spending and network traffic from EC2 instances, register wrong API calls, monitor cloud performance, and maintain the integrity of the cloud environment. It also allows the use of popular tools such as Datadog and Amazon Cloudwatch for data monitoring.

Best Practices for Improved Databricks Management

Cloud engineers must plan the workspace layout well to optimize the use of the Lakehouse and enable scalability and manageability. Some of the best practices to improve performance include:

• Minimizing the number of top-level accounts and creating a workspace as needed to be compliant, enable isolation, or due to geographical constraints.
• The isolation strategy should ensure flexibility without being complex.
• Automate the cloud processes.
• Improve governance by creating a COE team.

Indium Software, a leading software solutions provider, can facilitate the implementation and management of Databricks Architecture in your organization based on your unique business needs. Our team has experience and expertise in Databricks technology as well as industry experience to customize solutions based on industry best practices.

FAQ

The post What Cloud Engineers Need to Know about Databricks Architecture and Workflows appeared first on Indium.

While some large companies have successfully implemented specialised software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions or chosen a cloud-first strategy for new systems, many are still struggling to realise the full benefits of transferring the majority of their business systems to the cloud. This is because businesses frequently confuse just shifting IT systems to the cloud with the transformational approach required to get the full benefits of cloud computing technologies. Lifting and shifting legacy applications to the cloud will not inevitably result in the benefits that cloud infrastructure and systems can deliver. In other circumstances, this technique can lead to IT architectures that are even more complex, laborious, and expensive than the earlier model.

Lifting and shifting is insufficient

Organizations are now prioritising growth, speed, and innovation over cost in order to stay relevant to the ever-changing trends of technology. As a result, many firms are increasing their digital investments to achieve operational excellence, accelerate business performance, and become nimbler. Moving the existing business applications that were created for the traditional IT model to the cloud as plug and play will not award the potential benefits of the cloud.

The true benefit of the cloud engineering services can be experienced only by a holistic approach towards a transformational digital strategy. With CIOs viewing cloud technology as a driver for technology modernization, many organisations are adopting cloud platforms to shift their workloads, increasing their expenditure on technology infrastructure to build a more robust cloud-enabled/high-availability environment. According to a study done by global research firm Gartner, there has been a dramatic increase in the technology deployment of more than 80% of firms, owing to fewer alternatives for cost optimization.

The Next Big Thing is Intelligent AI and Hybrid cloud

Businesses are rapidly altering as artificial intelligence (AI) reinvents ways of working and reduces the need for human interaction. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), global spending on AI technology will exceed $79 billion by 2022. Artificial intelligence is having a significant impact on every industry and element of every company, from strategy to IT architecture, including cloud usage.

Cloud and AI synergy is resulting in faster adoption of both. Intelligent AI technology and hybrid cloud technology, when combined, provide precise, economical computing as well as a route for leveraging enormous amounts of data. Their technological collaboration enables businesses to effectively manage their data by streamlining the data management process and scalability (on a large scale), highlighting patterns and trends in data, delivering strategic insights and recommendations, improving customer experience, and optimising workflows.

Key aspects of hybrid multi-cloud

Cloud Modernization of applications through the use of containers, microservices, orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, standard Application Programming Interfaces, and open-source technologies is an important consideration. They must standardise and automate their processes, as

well as create new organisational structures that are compatible with DevOps and Machine Learning Operations (MLOps). Portability, interoperability, and management should be prioritised. Another crucial feature for enterprises to consider is a single pane of glass view for monitoring, provisioning, administering, and securing all clouds. Above all, they should integrate their public and private clouds, as well as legacy data centres, into a hybrid multi-cloud structure. Finally, businesses must realise that data is at the heart of today’s digital economy and enables AI.

The Advantages of Cloud-Based IT Process Automation

Companies that enable firms to better manage their infrastructures can not only save money but also reduce time to market and improve service levels.

Adoption of cloud computing is a huge enabler of essential standardisation and automation. Companies can use the cloud to:

• Reduce your IT overhead expenditures by 30-40%.
• Assist in scaling IT operations up and down as needed, optimising IT asset utilisation.
• Improve IT’s overall flexibility in addressing business demands by releasing business features more frequently; cloud providers are now delivering far more complex solutions than basic computing and storing, such as big-data and machine-learning services
• Improve service quality by leveraging the “self-healing” feature of standard solutions, such as automatically allocating more storage to a database. We’ve seen organisations cut IT incidents by 70% by leveraging cloud computing to reimagine their IT operations.

Many steps that organisations can take have proven beneficial to early adopters of cloud-enabled next-generation infrastructure. Among these includes, but are not limited to:

• Taking a look at the present IT portfolio: Before starting any cloud development or migration, take a critical look at your current IT portfolio to see what is suitable for public cloud platforms.
• Choosing your transformation strategy: Include all essential stakeholders in deciding whether your company will be an aggressive or opportunistic transformer.
• Defining IT and business objectives: In accordance with your methodology, develop a well-defined set of outcome-oriented ambitions for both the short and long term.
• Obtaining buy-in: Ensure top management commitment and investment, particularly from finance leaders, who must support the transition from the capital to operations and maintenance investments/accounting.
• Taking care of change management:Significant changes in IT practises and mindsets will be required for a heavily automated agile operating model. Invest in change management as well as cross-functional skill development across infrastructure, security, and application environments.

THE WAY FORWARD

Companies that use cloud computing as a starting point for IT automation may be able to achieve scalability, agility, flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings. However, this is only viable if both automation and cloud capabilities are developed.

Hybrid cloud has shown to be a valuable ally for businesses, allowing for smooth remote working. CIOs will now take cloud technology and artificial intelligence more seriously than ever before to de-risk their business operations, enhance profitability, reduce expenses, and develop new channels of consumer contact, all while ensuring security and compliance.

The post Will AI help in Cloud modernization thereby increasing adoption rate? appeared first on Indium.