Workload Policies

Once an application workload stands-up in the cloud, it needs policies and procedures to enable friction-free cloud decisions, financial management and prevent unauthorized access or activities to the workload.

Having a cloud governance board may appear counterproductive however can serve to give a singular approach to living in the enterprise’s cloud environment. It can help answer questions like who “own” what portions of the cloud, architecture, costs, security and operational aspects.

Few key expectations in governing a cloud environment include:

  • A service catalog to help standardize services for users, provide control on which users/groups can access these services, enable users to launch services on self-service basis.
  • Security and compliance measures including data encryption, logging, network segregation etc.
  • Single landing page for all requests

Workloadpolicies

Cloud management for your multi-cloud strategy

Cloud governance dwells a lot on managing your cloud operations wherein enterprises try to combine native tools with cloud management platforms and cloud API’s. Broadly these tools are Operations, DevOps or Governance (read policy) based.

Most enterprises journey into cloud in a hybrid multi-step process. This involves having their systems and processes spread across several public clouds, portions in legacy data center and private clouds. One of the expectations from the cloud team supporting these multi-cloud environments is to present a XaaS experience. I.e. allow many self-serving portals to Developers, Managers and Executives as part of newly expanded IT support.

In selecting your cloud management strategy, consider the following:

  • Resource depth – kind of metrics needed to satisfy adequate measurement and reporting of a resource – by technology
  • Interface – options to interconnect and gather data from various end-points and present to your company’s dashboards
  • Compliance and Security
  • Cost management – due to nature of cloud business, it is essential for all IT consumers to be sensitive of resource costs by relying on pre-defined spending limits and budget alerts.
  • Automation – seek single-click automation to deploy common services like compute and storage instances and extend the XaaS experience.
  • User Management – Options to assign roles, create policies and restrictions to launch instance-types and network settings

Optimizing your Cloud Ecosystem

Uncategorized

Technology professionals see their Cloud journey as an ever-changing opportunity to fine tune data-computing workloads for performance, system, costs, availability and energy efficiency. The decision process is no longer an IT department prerogative but rather a corporate user call with a credit-card and ‘I want what I want’ intent.

Most IT enabled organizations have a support division which provides centralized services for cloud provisioning. Their division’s success can be measured by knowing how metered resources were strategically and tactically placed or replaced due to consolidation, upgrades or decommissioning.

Below diagram depicts few scenarios for optimization opportunities.Presentation1

Moving Applications onto the Cloud

Most of us would be interested in an innovative, secure and cost-effective way to run IT services without disrupting business operations, and improve employee productivity. The Cloud has enabled organizations to start thinking differently about infrastructure. Getting to rapidly provision and release IT resources with minimal management support is becoming easy and self-serving among service providers.

Moving your application to the cloud is little more than lift-n-shift. To be cloud-ready we want applications to be separable on compute and storage resources. And to contain automation characteristics, we want to look for any anti-patterns like stateful machines, or vertical scaling requirements and appropriately modify application architectures.

Traditional workloads lack tolerance to any downtime and tend to scale-up than scale-out. Cloud workloads tend to be distributed, have fault tolerance built-in and tend to scale-out (horizontal scaling). Thus any application needs to be pattern-matched to be deploy-able in a cloud ecosystem.

CloudApps