Cloud Solutions
When it comes to the Cloud Services that I provide, they all revolve around AWS, although I would say that Google and Microsoft cloud services have very similar services and infrastructure, and wouldn’t be hard to pick up if I needed too.
However, if time is of the essence, and it most cases it is, AWS would be the cloud provider I am most familiar with, although I am working on adding Google and Microsoft (Azure) to my tool kit.
Cloud Migrations
There are still many companies that want to take advantage of the scalability, flexibility, security, disaster recovery and cost efficiency of the cloud, but they do not know how, or even where to start. Well, here is my process!
Systems, like companies, are very different, but the process of a Cloud Migration is the same. As long as the process is stringently stuck to, it doesn’t matter if the system is an Enterprise streaming service or moving local WordPress installation into the Cloud.
What is involved in the migration process?
This is about sitting down with the client and listening to their pain points, what their vision is and taking a look at the system or systems that they are planning to move over into the cloud.
The architecture that will support the system that is being migrated will be as different as the system involved. Thankfully, AWS provides a ton of services that can handle pretty much any system we could architect on it. In this phase we look to understand every aspect of the system in question and determine what system or service or product within AWS could be substituted to do the same job, for instance, do we utilize the RDS system within AWS to house a structured database like MySQL or do we just set a Linux EC2 instance and install MySQL on it?
Once the system is architected, we make certain that we have adequate backup and fallback processes in place prior to taking the on-premise system offline (normally during off-hours) executing the migration process.
Part of the migration process is validating that everything is functioning as expected, that the response times are good and the data that the system processes is clean. This period can last weeks or months, once again dependent on system size, and also involves applying certain stresses on the system to test performance, disaster recovery processes, etc.
Ongoing migration monitoring and management basically is the process of collecting system data like error logs, security logs, performance logs and a variety of other metrics to assess how the system is performing, what the cost savings are, how the system is scaling to increased or decreased traffic,…essentially what is the overall health of the system, what problems were encountered, how they were addressed and how we could have improved processes.
Generally, the baton is passed along to the client at this point, unless they maintain an on-going support contract where the system is periodically monitored and problems addressed until such a point arises that the customer can execute this on their own.
Cloud App Creation
If we are creating an application from scratch into the cloud, the process is much the same as it is for a migration, the only difference is that instead of executing a migration we would be developing the application. Once the development is complete, all of the other steps of the process are the same.
Cloud App Management
You already have one or more workloads sitting in the AWS cloud but you don’t have the resources to manage things like the IAM users associated with the application, monitoring the systems or optimizing scalability, cost and security for the system. While you seek out that full time resource, you just need someone to maintain system until such time you find the permanent resource to take over that responsibility.