Important Aspects to Consider When Implementing Cloud Solutions

Once the appropriate target cloud environment has been identified, the next step is to design the cloud solution. The following are the critical aspects to be consider during design:

• Security: This is one of the primary deterrents for organizations to adopting cloud solutions. The following points should be taken care of to provide appropriate security:
  • Cloud security controls: Deterrent controls, preventative controls, detective controls, corrective controls
  • Security and privacy: Identity management, physical security, personnel security, privacy
  • Data security: Confidentiality, access controllability, integrity
  • Encryption: Data in transit, data at rest
  • Compliance: Business continuity and data recovery, log and audit trail
  • Legal and contractual issues
• High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR): The nature of cloud means you have limited control on the scheduled and un-scheduled outages. If there is an NFR for this, then the component design should be robust enough for providing HA and DR functionality. The infrastructure itself does not provide any related features, but this can be achieved using the services provided by the PaaS provider in harmony with the application design. A few options are to host the application on multiple data centres of cloud, monitor the application and scale as and when required, use containers for dynamic provisioning of services, etc.
• Data backup and restore: Cloud providers offer various backup service options (like Evault backup services). Application teams should consider these services for the ability to restore the system in case of any data loss.
• DevOps pipeline: Automation and using tools for executing repeated activities is the key for achieving quicker deployments and providing more business value to the client. Cloud offerings, especially PaaS solutions, offer a wide variety of DevOps features for achieving continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous operations.
• Use of containers: Processes and memory can be self-provisioned on cloud, and this dynamic nature of cloud enables the efficient implementation of container technologies like microservices and Docker. Automatic and dynamic scaling up/scaling down can be achieved instantly to support additional instances of services, depending on the application load.
• Load balancing: Load balancing is critical for couple of reasons. Firstly, it can act as a proxy for shielding the backend application servers. Secondly, for balancing the load across multiple servers. Cloud providers offer different load balancing algorithms, like round-robin, min-min, min-max, etc. It is important to understand the options and chose the appropriate one.
• Latency: Network latency is an important aspect to be considered, especially in a hybrid cloud environment, where there are multiple network hops (possibly across different cloud vendors) for a single client request. Cloud service providers can assist in intelligently routing end-users to the closest cloud data centre region within their network.
• Clustered environment: In a clustered environment, it is suggested to provision different servers on separate pods. Any scheduled maintenance is usually done on one pod at a time. So, within the cluster, this distribution will ensure that at least one server is up at any given time, to handle client requests.
• Scaling (vertical/horizontal): This is the ability for an IT resource to handle growing or decreasing demands in a capable manner and is one of the most beneficial and popular features of cloud. Horizontal scaling is often considered a long-term advantage, whereas vertical scaling is usually considered a short-term advantage. Vertical scaling may have a cost benefit, but it could end up being the weakest link or a single point of failure.
• Middleware and software: Choosing the appropriate middleware and software for the solution depends on multiple factors, such as usage in existing applications, skills available, licensing limitations, options provided by the cloud provider, etc. The cloud vendors provide a pre-defined set of options. So, a compatibility check must be done before migrating any existing application. Part/whole application rewrite may be required to make use of the various cloud features to full potential.
• Monitoring: Application performance monitoring and infrastructure (server) monitoring are critical for making sure the application is both secure and available. Cloud providers offer tools to analyze virtual machine workloads. They provide highly customizable dashboards and metric collection, which can provide consolidated solutions for consistent monitoring. Automated actions (like increasing hardware resources, managing the number of service instances running) can be configured to maintain the health of the system.
• Hybrid cloud solutions: They include application integrations spanning different cloud environments, across different vendors or on-premises. Firewalls will have to be configured to enable such integrations. These integrations could be asynchronous or synchronous in nature, based on the functional and/or technical requirements. Caching of data that does not frequently change can help reduce application processing times.
• Encryption: Encryption of data at rest is important in a cloud environment, for security and compliance reasons, especially in multi-tenant environments. Encryption of backed-up data is also equally important.