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

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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.