Today’s organizations need to be more agile to respond to customer demands, which requires the ability to quickly scale up to millions of customers and scale down as needed without impacting the budget. Organizations need to continuously acquire new customers, delighting them while working in a fiercely competitive environment. Cloud migration could be the answer for achieving agility and speed. The cloud enables frequent application releases and reduces costs by applying automation and data center consolidation. In this article, you will learn about the benefits of the cloud and some popular public cloud providers.
This article is an excerpt from second edition of Solutions Architect’s Handbook. This handbook will teach you how to create robust, scalable, and fault-tolerant solutions and next-generation architecture designs in a cloud environment.
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Benefits of cloud native architecture
In recent years, technology has been changing rapidly and new companies have been born in the cloud world, disrupting old and long-standing organizations. Rapid growth is possible because of no upfront cost being involved when organizations use the cloud, and there is less risk in experimentation due to the pay-as-you-go model of the cloud compared to paying the upfront cost of hosting your own server.
The cloud agile approach helps employees in an organization develop innovative thinking and implement their ideas without waiting for the long cycle of infrastructure. With the cloud, customers don’t need to plan excess capacity in advance to handle their peak season, such as the holiday shopping season for retailers; they have the elasticity to provision resources to meet demand instantly. This significantly helps reduce costs and improve the customer’s experience. For any organization to stay in the competition, they have to move fast and innovatively.
With the cloud, enterprises are not only able to get their infrastructure quickly across the globe but can also access a wide variety of technologies that were never available before. These include access to cutting edge technologies such as the following:
- Big data and analytics
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Robotics
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Blockchain
- Quantum computing
Also, to achieve scalability and elasticity, these are some of the reasons that can trigger an initiative for cloud migration and hybrid cloud strategy:
- The data center needs a technology refresh
- The data center’s lease is ending
- The data center has run out of storage and compute capacity
- Modernization of an application
- Leverage cutting-edge technologies
- Need to optimize IT resources to save on operational costs
- Disaster recovery planning and operational resilience
- Utilizing a content distribution network for the website
- Reduce upfront capital expenditures and eliminate maintenance costs
- Increase workforce efficiency and productivity
- Improve business agility
Every organization has a different strategy, and one size does not fit all when it comes to cloud adoption. The frequent use cases are putting development and testing environments in the cloud to add agility for developers so that they can move faster. As hosting web applications is becoming more economical and more straightforward with the cloud, organizations are using the cloud for digital transformation by hosting their websites and digital properties in the cloud.
For application accessibility, it is essential to not only build an application for the web browser but to ensure it is accessible through smart mobiles and tablets. The cloud is helping with such transformations. Data processing and analytics is another area where enterprises are utilizing the cloud since it is less expensive and faster to collect, store, analyze, and share data with the cloud.
Building a solution architecture for the cloud is slightly different than it is for regular enterprise architecting. While moving to the cloud, you have to develop cloud thinking and understand how to leverage the in-built capabilities of the cloud. For cloud thinking, you follow the pay-as-you-go model. You need to make sure that you optimize your workload properly and run your servers only when it’s required.
You need to think about how to optimize costs by starting the server for your workload when needed and choosing the right strategy for the workload, which always needs to be running. In the cloud, the solution architect needs to have a holistic view of each component regarding performance, scaling, high availability, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, security, and automation.
The other areas of optimization are cloud native monitoring and alerting mechanisms. You may not need to bring your existing third-party tool from on-premise to the cloud as you can utilize native cloud monitoring better and get rid of costly third-party licensing software. Also, now, you get to have deployment capabilities to any part of the world in minutes, so don’t restrict yourself to a particular region and utilize the global deployment model to build better high-availability and disaster recovery mechanisms.
The cloud provides excellent deals for automation; you can pretty much automate everything. Automation not only reduces errors and speeds up time to market; it also saves lots of cost by utilizing human resources efficiently and freeing them up from performing tedious and repetitive tasks. The cloud works on a shared responsibility model where cloud vendors are responsible for securing physical infrastructure. However, the security of an application and its data is entirely the customer’s responsibility. Therefore, it’s important to lock down your environment and keep a tab on security by utilizing cloud native tools for monitoring, alerts, and automation.
Let’s learn about some popular public cloud choices that you should know.
Popular public cloud choices
Since the cloud is the norm now, there are many cloud providers in the market that provide cutting-edge technology platforms that are competing to get market share. The following are the major cloud providers (at the time of writing):
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is one of the oldest and largest cloud providers. AWS provides IT resources such as compute power, storage, databases, and other services on a need basis over the internet with a pay-as-you-go model. AWS not only offers IaaS; it has a broad range of offerings in PaaS and SaaS. AWS provides multiple offerings in cutting-edge technologies in the area of machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT, and a comprehensive set of significant data capabilities. You can host almost any workload in AWS and combine services to design an optimal solution.
- Microsoft Azure: Also known as Azure and like any cloud provider, it provides IT resources such as compute, network, storage, and databases over the internet to its customers.
Like AWS, Azure also provides IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings in the cloud, which include a range of services from computing, storage, data management, content distribution networks, containers, big data, machine learning, and IoT. Also, Microsoft has wrapped its popular offerings in the cloud through Microsoft Office, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SharePoint, MS SQL Database, and so on. - Google Cloud Platform (GCP): GCP provides cloud offerings in the area of computing, storage, networking, and machine learning. Like AWS and Azure, it has a global network of data centers available as infrastructure as a service for its customers to consume IT resources over the internet. In terms of compute, GCP offers Google Cloud Functions for the serverless environment, which you can compare with AWS Lambda functions in AWS and Azure Functions in Azure. Similarly, GCP offers multiple programming languages for application development with containers so that you can deploy application workloads.
There are many other cloud vendors available, such as Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud, but the major markets are captured by the aforementioned cloud providers.
Summary
The cloud is becoming the most popular mainstream application hosting and development environment for enterprises. In this article, we have explored cloud thinking and how it’s related to solution architecture design. We also considered which cloud provider to use. This choice is up to the customer, which can be impacted by the availability of the functionality they are looking for or based on their existing relationship with providers. Sometimes, large enterprises choose a multi-cloud strategy to utilize the best providers.
