Currently, all growing businesses are dealing with transitions from on-premises infrastructures to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or both. From a strategic perspective, the decisions made referring to this significant technology shift will impact your company for the next decade.
Whether you are looking to move one workload or shutdown an entire data center, the transformation is complex and brings in many difficult decisions that influence key company processes. Successful cloud migration must rely on an in-depth analysis and high-level expertise.
In this review we answer some of the most important questions that our clients have asked during their cloud journey.
Basic understanding of cloud transformation
Cloud transformation Introduction
Cloud Computing Services are currently gaining more attention from a wide range of audiences from different business sectors. How should we envision Cloud Services?
Let’s think of them as if we are turning the lights on/off at home. When we turn the lights on, we only focus on them to work. Of course, we know that to do so we need electricity, that can be produced from different sources. But we do not think about how the current is transported, from where, and what kind of nodes are involved in this whole process. When we turn the lights on with a switch, the electrical power becomes the tool that gives us many benefits.
First of all, we pay only for the amount of electricity that we have used. We do not pay the provider for the electrical power upfront. We do not have to care about the power plants’ upgrades or any other technical issues that might happen during the use of the energy in our homes. We do not have to think about how the energy provider will scale the electricity supply with demand. We are sure that we will have electricity ready to be used and to power the lightbulb anytime we want.
Cloud Computing Services eliminate the problems of computing/storage/networks/analytics that every person/company will encounter during the everyday life/growth and while using more and more digital services that will become necessary for their everyday tasks.
Cloud Computing Services can be categorized into:
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Computing Power – renting needed servers with pre-installed OS, apps etc.
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Storage – renting storage for data or renting databases.
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Analytics – renting storage and computing power for analytics purposes.
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Network – renting VPNs or creating different secure networks.
The Cloud Computing Services Provider is responsible for providing hardware to perform all the tasks of his services, as well as maintenance, upgrades, and updates.
There are 3 main services within Computing Power Services:
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Virtual Machines – grant far more control over processes and burden the lessee with the maintenance; it is a virtual desktop, that will be configured (OS, storage, region) when requested. The Cloud Provider hosts these VM inside one of its servers in his Data Center. VM can be set up within a few minutes (Azure 5:30 with deployment). Payments for VMs are based on the lifetime of the server and are not dependent on whether they are used or not (Azure).
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Containerization – less engaging from the user’s perspective, it is a pre-configured environment for launching applications. Containers are similar to VMs, but they do not need the operating systems to be provided/chosen by the users, thus deployment of Containers can take a few seconds, as this only requires launching the application in the container. Payment is based on the life-time of the container, not dependent on whether the app is performing its tasks within it or not (Azure).
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Serverless Computing – enables launching application codes without creating, configuring and maintaining the server. Each part of the application is governed by functions, that are triggered with certain actions. In this model, payment is based on the computing time of each function during their run (Azure).
