To understand what replica lag is, we first have to put a bit of context. Replication lag occurs in a special type of database instance that we call read replicas. These are created from a source DB instance that acts as the primary database. Updates (inserts of new data) made to the primary database are copied asynchronously to the read replica. Having these types of replicas allows you to reduce the load on the primary DB instance by routing read-type queries to those instances. Replication between these instances occurs through a secure communication channel and asynchronously.

So what is replica lag and how does it affect our instances? Replication lag is the delay that occurs in asynchronous replication between the primary and read databases. To identify the status of the replication, you will need to look at the binlog dump, io_thread, and sql_thread threads. Commands such as show master status, show slave status executed on the respective instances and continuous monitoring help us identify if there is any delay that could affect performance causing data inconsistency.

We cannot eliminate replica lag but we must reduce it as much as possible. Determine if there are configuration differences between the primary and replica instance, too much write workload on the primary instance, too long transactions, incorrect parameter settings, review version changelogs… these are what we usually do at Geko Cloud to decide if any type of update or other type of action should be carried out.

Lag replication example

This is what recently happened to a client who, after updating the version of the main database and its respective mariadb replicas to v.10.4.24, began to notice a deterioration in the replica lag as we can see in the graph.

Our team was investigating the problem and after reviewing the Changelogs from version 10.5.0 to 10.5.17, among other things, we were able to notice that this latest version solved the replication lag problems caused by the previous version. Also, we found that the best thing to do in this case was to upgrade the replicas to version 10.15.17 and leave the primary database at version 10.4.24. To do this, we created two more reading replicas, which we updated to that version in such a way that we could verify that the replica lag was effectively reduced again, as can be seen in the graph.

These graphs were taken from the two read replicas with versions 10.4.24 and 10.5.17 of mariadb in the same time slot to verify that the replica lag had actually decreased.

We hope this can give you an idea of how the Geko Cloud team can help you if you need to deploy your services in a Cloud environment. Just contact us and we will be happy to help you.

La entrada What is replica lag? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

General rules:

• Configure a main account dedicated to billing, and then configure subaccounts/projects linking invoice to that account
• In each account/project, configure a budget and an alert if consum exceeds a certain amount (to be defined depending on your usual consume) (AWS, GCP, Azure. This way you’ll be warned during the month… and not at the end receiving bill.
•  If your account has several projects/environments, use labels/tags to be able to identify each resource.
• Export your billing to a database (Athena / Bigquery ) This has a cost (not really expensive if you don’t pass your day querying it) but allows you to have much more details in some cases. For instance in this AWS invoice we can see 595$ of datatransfer out without any details.

 If you go on Athena, we can see that this is mainly due to a loadbalancer.

If we want to save money on that resource, we know where to start.

Finaly review periodically your bills (every 3/6/12 months)

Bill review:

One of best automatic tool you could use is CloudCheckr. After configuring an account in your project it gives you instances that are oversized. Bad thing is that:

• It’s done checking CPU but not RAM. One instance with few CPU usage but full of RAM can’t be resized.
• It doesn’t take into “auto-scalling” instances that are up and down automatically

So another way is to check bill manually. Go to billing details, and review costs, starting by highest one to lowest. Here are some question you can ask yourself for each service

S3:

• Is versioning active and needed? Versioning on a backup’s bucket can be very costly for instance
• All files are regularly accessed? If not you can implement lifecycle to save money in buckets with lots of data
• Files can be deleted after xx days? If so you can also implement a lifecycle

Instances:

• Check CPU / RAM use in your instances and resize your instances if possible
• Is autoscalling correctly configured? You may not need that much instances always up.
• Could you stop some instances at night / on week ends?

Volums:

•  Check unmounted volums and delete them if they are useless

Databases:

• Check CPU / RAM use and resize them if possible

Load balancer:

• Check if loadbalancers could be group in a single one.
• All loadbalancers are usefull? (one loabalancer with a single instance, or returning 200 could be useless)

Those are example for some services. Obviously each case is diferent, so if you’re still lost with all of this, feel free to contact us. We could help you to configure everything.

Instance reservation

Finally, once infrastructure is correctly provisioned (Instances with correct sizing, up/down xx hours per day) we can reserve instances. In other words you commit to keep instances for a certain time, and eventually paying upfront. In exchange you’ll have some discounts. The longest we commit and the most we pay upfront… The most will be our discount.
But we’ll see that in an incoming article.

We hope that this article has been useful to you and we are very attentive that soon we will continue publishing more related content.

From Geko we can adives you to maximize cost savings in your cloud system.

If you would like to get to know us better, check out our services. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require further information

La entrada Cost Control in Cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Today, millions of organisations are leveraging AWS cloud services to build sophisticated applications that help them increase reliability, flexibility and scalability. This post on “What is AWS?” is designed to help you gain an in-depth understanding of this popular cloud platform, its benefits, services and more.

What is AWS and what is it for?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud services platform that offers a mix of software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) packages from dozens of data centres and multiple availability zones (AZs) in regions around the world. Each AZ contains multiple data centres. Customers can configure virtual machines and replicate their data across multiple AZs to provide a system that is highly resilient to server or data centre failure.

AWS aims to enable organisations to grow and profit through its wide range of services. With this platform, they can store, access, and manage their business data while protecting it from unauthorized access.

What services/products does AWS offer?

Within all the services offered by AWS, we find various cloud computing products, databases, blockchain, application integration, internet of things, migration and transfer, networking and content delivery, and many more. Some of the most widely used Amazon Web Services technologies are:

1. Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2‘s web interface is used to reduce costly physical servers by creating virtual machines and managing other server features, such as storage, security, ports, etc. With Amazon EC2 you can create servers in minutes with your preferred operating system.

2. Amazon RDS
Amazon helps us in every way it can to make our infrastructure less complicated, which is why it provides us with the RDS service. By using this AWS service, dedicated database instances can be created in a matter of minutes, fully managed by the AWS support team and capable of supporting multiple database engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, and many more.

3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon S3 is AWS‘s core service for file storage and retrieval via an API (Application Programming Interface). Amazon S3 offers a file storage service as well as high-quality integrations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH and FedRAMP so that data is not compromised. In addition, the S3 service offers you different types of storage to optimise the cost.

4. Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront helps you improve website speed and access to data in the cloud. It also manages all user content efficiently through a global content delivery service.

5. Amazon VPC
If you are ready to isolate your entire IT infrastructure from exposure, then the only way to do it is with Amazon VPC. This service creates a virtual private network that cannot be accessed by anyone or anything except the people and systems you authorise. These networks are logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS clouds.

6. Amazon SNS
SNS is a Simple Notification Service that alerts subscriber services to automatically perform tasks in response to specified triggers. Amazon SNS is a notification system that offers integration with any type of application, be it PHP, Python, Node, etc; and notifications can be sent to all types of users whether on the web or mobile.

7. AWS Lambda
Is your server getting saturated with requests? AWS Lambda is designed to scale to handle any traffic load. It is possibly one of the most innovative services on AWS, as it allows you to run your code in a serverless way, i.e. without the need to manage servers. In addition, it is compatible with the main programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and more.

8. AWS Autoscaling
If you are looking to grow or expand your application to millions of users then AWS Autoscaling is the solution. This tool allows you to manage a fleet of servers when your application demands it, creating multiple instances when needed. The service is free, only charged for the number of instances used.

9. AWS Beanstalk
AWS Beanstalk was created to help developers manage website infrastructure and save time. This tool automates the installation, configuration and provisioning of other AWS services such as EC2, RDS and S3.

As you can see, AWS has a large number of services related to cloud infrastructure, related to data and the use of this data for any business, of any size and sector. If you want to know more about all the products offered by AWS, click on the following link to get all the information: Cloud Products (amazon.com)

Advantages of using AWS

Many companies, small or large, rely on AWS for the wide range of services it offers. Here are some of the most notable advantages that differentiate it from other companies. These are:

SECURITY
Security is one of the most important issues when working in cloud environments. AWS has dozens of data centres around the world that are continuously monitored 24/7 and strictly maintained. In addition, AWS has certifications and accreditations, encryption of data at rest and in transit, hardware security modules and strong physical security.

PAY PER USE
One of the most important advantages is the AWS pay-as-you-go billing model. There is no upfront cost to build a storage system and no need to estimate usage. For organisations that have daily or seasonal peaks, this is a real advantage.

WIDE RANGE OF SERVICES
Over time, AWS has expanded its range of products and services to more than 175 products ranging from basic storage and computing to more specialised services such as robotics. In short, AWS offers such a wide variety of services that there is bound to be a product or service that fits your business needs perfectly.

COST-EFFECTIVE
Whether you are a start-up or a large enterprise organisation, you can benefit from the economic advantages that AWS offers, such as not having to pay upfront to use its services or resources.

GLOBAL LEADER
Amazon Web Services has networks in nearly 190 countries around the world and supports more than one million active customers. Its customers include large enterprises and public sector organisations. As businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, the choices of cloud-based services continue to multiply. However, only a handful of options manage to meet the different business needs that exist, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

How does AWS work?

First of all, you need to register with AWS. When you go to create your account, you will be asked for your credit card details. Once your account is created, you can start exploring the AWS management console and view its services. You can also watch 10-minute tutorials on Amazon to learn how each of their products works.

AWS and Geko Cloud

At Geko Cloud we are cloud experts and we work with DevOps methodology, accompanying our customers throughout the process from cloud migration to cloud management. Contact us with no commitment!

La entrada ¿What is AWS? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

In simple terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.

Concept 

Cloud computing, popularly called «cloud», is the provision of different services over the Internet, which are on physical or virtual servers, and which are maintained and controlled by a cloud provider. These resources include tools and applications such as data storage, servers, databases, networks, and software.  

Within the cloud, there are services that we can make use of, as we will see below (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS), but before we move on to the next point we leave you with an explanatory video on “What is Cloud Computing?” explained by Simplilearn.

Cloud variants: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

If you are considering migrating to the cloud, you should be aware of the three main service models in cloud computing and have a good understanding of their characteristics in order to choose the one that best suits your company’s needs.  

SaaS (Software as a Service)

This service model is the most widespread cloud variant, a distribution model that delivers software applications over the Internet. At this level, you don’t need to know anything about technology, unlike PaaS or IaaS platforms. Users can access SaaS applications and services from anywhere and on any device, as long as we have internet. One of the best-known examples of the SaaS model is the Microsoft Office 365 application.

PaaS (Platform as a service)

Cloud platform services, also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), are based on IaaS environments.  Users access these tools via the Internet through APIs, web portals or gateway software. PaaS provides a framework for developers to build on and use to create customized applications. Common PaaS providers include AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Google App Engine.  

IaaS (Infraestructura como servicio)

IaaS providers, such as AWS, consist of highly scalable and automated computing resources, i.e. they provide a virtual server instance and storage, as well as APIs that allow users to migrate workloads to a virtual machine (VM) and allow customization of instances, for various workload needs.

In short, the benefits of the cloud are that there is no need to invest in hardware, is scalable and the services can be tailored to the needs of your business.

Types of cloud

Public Cloud

Public platforms are third-party providers that offer computing resources over the Internet. Users do not have to do anything or buy anything, because the entire infrastructure is owned by the company or provider, which takes care of support and upgrades. In addition, services are paid for on a subscription basis, which reduces the need to invest large amounts of capital and frees up your internal IT resources.  

Private cloud

A private platform is unique to a single organization. Broadly speaking, it is a cloud service designed only for the end-user, usually located in an on-site data center or hosted by an external service provider. The private cloud can be associated with Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud.

Hybrid cloud

It is the combination of private cloud structures with public cloud integration, providing greater flexibility by moving workloads between different cloud solutions as needs and costs fluctuate, as well as helping to optimise infrastructure, security and compliance. Learn more about the benefits of migrating to hybrid cloud.

Advantages of migrating to the cloud

If you are considering migrating to the cloud, but before you make the switch, it is important to ask yourself the question: “Am I ready? Here we explain the main advantages of taking this step:  

• • Pay-per-use: You only pay for the resources and workloads you use.
  • Disaster recovery: An important advantage of the cloud is data backup, i.e. the cloud can help you protect your files. In case of emergency, such as natural disasters or power outages, data can be recovered quickly.
  • Lower cost:  Using cloud infrastructure can reduce costs, as you don’t have to invest large amounts of money in buying and maintaining equipment: hardware, facilities, utilities or building large data centres.
  • Scalability: A cloud environment offers companies scalability and flexibility since it does not require such high performance in terms of data processing and storage. In this way, companies can add or subtract resources according to their needs. As businesses grow, your system will grow with them. 
  • Elasticity: is one of the key defining characteristics of cloud computing. Enterprises can scale up the capacity they have in the cloud and the resources available as computing needs increase, and scale down again when demand decreases.
  • Availability 24/7: A cloud infrastructure maximises business productivity and efficiency by ensuring that your application is always accessible, enabling easy collaboration and sharing between users in multiple locations.
  • Multi-tenancy: allows many users to share the same physical infrastructures or the same applications, while maintaining privacy and security over their own data in a flexible manner. This enables cost reduction through economies of scale.

If you finally want to make the jump to the cloud, in our post “Steps to take before migrating to the cloud” we explain some of the things to think about before migrating to the cloud.

Choosing a cloud provider

Today, there is a wide variety of cloud providers offering cloud services. When considering a cloud service provider, you must take into account certain considerations, in the following link we explain some keys to choose the best cloud provider. Below are some of the most important and well-known cloud providers:

Why choose Geko Cloud?

As you can see, cloud computing is very complex, so to make the most of the advantages offered by the cloud it is important to have a team of experts in cloud infrastructure and development. The Geko team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

In this post you can read about the advantages of outsourcing DevOps, as well as having a team to manage your migration to the cloud.

La entrada What is the cloud? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Below we will explain the most common stages that can be found in the development of cloud migration.

Analysis of technical and business needs

This first phase involves determining the objectives of the migration and deciding on the most appropriate method or strategy to migrate, depending on different factors such as purpose, timelines, and constraints.
Moving data to the cloud, or even changing cloud service providers, carries both risks and benefits, so it is essential that the business is fully committed to the success of the migration process and prepared for the changes that will occur.

Planning and evaluation of resources

In this stage, a complete analysis of your IT environment will be performed, i.e. your current infrastructure and the applications you use will be evaluated to determine the most appropriate migration strategy to avoid anything going wrong during or after the migration. 

In addition, it should be taken into account that there is the option to choose between three different types of cloud platforms: private, public, and hybrid. There is also the option to assess the computing resources needed through three cloud computing models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

In this step, it will be important to decide, taking into account the pros and cons, whether to carry out the migration while keeping the infrastructure as close as possible to the original one (lift and shift) or to take advantage of the process to refactor the applications, so as to take more and better advantage of the benefits that the cloud provider can offer. This decision will have a significant impact on timelines and complexity, among other factors.

Design and construction

This phase is usually the most time-consuming. Before migrating an application to the cloud, we must first design a migration plan that defines the sequence of migration activities and the resources that will be used to subsequently carry out the migration and validation process of these applications.

It should be highlighted that it may be necessary to work on the management of application resources in order to reduce their consumption and, in this way, optimize costs.

Testing

This is the most important phase of migration. Despite preparing an elaborate cloud migration plan, problems and risks cannot be completely eliminated, so it is extremely important to test and ensure that applications are running smoothly in the cloud environment. 

Pilot testing helps to check whether services and applications are working, and thus whether they can be migrated to the cloud without problems. At the same time, the test results also help to identify migration issues and risks, thoroughly verifying the entire process to be carried out.

Migration

If the pilot tests are successful, data and application migration can take place. The final phase of migration to the cloud involves the use of the necessary tools to speed up and automate the process, e.g. the use of infrastructure as code.  

Monitoring

Once the migration has been successfully completed, it is important to implement infrastructure monitoring to help identify and fix any problems that may arise in the new environment, and to implement an alerting system to report major problems at all times.

It is worth remembering that these cloud migration phases may be different depending on the type of cloud migration. Also, the phases differ from one cloud platform to another. It is therefore important to work with a partner who is an expert in cloud infrastructure and development to make the most of the advantages offered by the cloud. Geko’s team has wide experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

If you are interested in learning more about the types of cloud migration or other information prior to migrating to the cloud, we recommend you read some of our posts:

• Cloud migration “lift and shift” | Geko Cloud
• Steps before migrate to the cloud | Geko Cloud
• 4 Advantages of migrating to the hybrid cloud | Geko Cloud

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We all know the benefits of migrating to a cloud environment: increased efficiency and productivity, reduced costs, flexibility, future-proofing, and the list goes on, which is why many businesses are considering this type of migration. But what exactly is hybrid cloud, and which is it right for your business? Below, we’ll explain what hybrid cloud means, and highlight the main advantages of switching to this type of model.

What is a hybrid cloud?

The foundation of a hybrid cloud model is the combination of private cloud (usually an on-premise data center) and public cloud infrastructures (AWS, GCP, Azure…), providing enterprises with greater flexibility by moving workloads between different cloud solutions as needs and costs fluctuate.

Advantages

• Costs: Cost is a key factor for many organizations considering a migration to the cloud. Hybrid cloud computing models are affordable because they can take advantage of the existing infrastructure and have a much lower upfront investment. By migrating to a hybrid environment, the public cloud can be used for things like data storage and so on, while other business-critical or sensitive data is hosted on local private servers. This infrastructure makes it easier for companies to monitor cloud usage, and to obtain detailed reports on cloud usage – and the cost of cloud services – by department and workload.
• Scalability: A hybrid cloud environment gives enterprises greater control over their data, as well as providing the scalability and flexibility needed by combining the best of both worlds, allowing the cloud configuration to be adjusted to automatically respond to changes in demand, optimizing performance and efficiency. For example, critical data, assets, and operations can continue to reside in the private cloud, while new applications are developed in the public cloud and analytics programs are run that would simply be beyond the capacity of an enterprise with only a few servers at its disposal.
• Flexibility: Another advantage of migrating to a hybrid environment is the flexibility it offers because when you have all your data stored in a private cloud, you have greater control but the cost increases due to maintenance obligations and rigidity. While on the other hand, public cloud computing is highly scalable, it does not offer the security that a private cloud can provide. As a result, mixing these two solutions results in a hybrid cloud that blends the advantages of both options.
• Security: Security is a key point for many enterprise IT teams, so protecting sensitive or valuable data is always a challenge in any published application, but this is especially true in public clouds. By recognizing this risk and managing it, hybrid cloud computing is an excellent way to gain greater control over this data, offering increased security by reducing the potential for data exposure. In addition, this type of hybrid environment allows cloud security teams to have a backup or replication of certain data in both clouds, which is a very important aspect in the case of disaster recovery.

Is hybrid cloud a good option for your business?

This model is a great option for companies looking for the best of both worlds, i.e. cloud computing while retaining the private server features they need to run their business. 

If you want to take full advantage of the benefits offered by the hybrid cloud, it is important to have a team of experts at your side in the cloud migration process. Geko‘s team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology, accompanying our clients throughout the process from migration to management in the cloud, and adapting 100% to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

Don’t forget to come back to Geko’s blog and check out what’s new in here! The Geko team will be always glad to see you back

Contact us for further information!

La entrada 4 Advantages of migrating to the hybrid cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Establish a migration plan: Once the migration objective is clear, the applications to be migrated and the team is ready, the next step is to establish a cloud migration plan.  This plan should describe the migration process step by step. To plan this process, you need to know which components will be moved and decide on the order according to the priority or difficulty of the migration. Once we have decided on an order, we will assign these components to a phase of the implementation, thus creating a staggered system in a way that minimises the impact on the organisation, while reducing the risks of the migration, but increasing the period of time needed for the migration.

Training: A key aspect is the formation of a team to oversee the transition. The team’s main objective is to manage the migration from start to finish. If the company does not have cloud specialists, consideration should be given to hiring a cloud migration specialist to ease the transition.

Cloud Provider: You should then compare different cloud platforms and migration models to choose the right one for your business. Migrating to the cloud is not an easy task, which is why it is essential to choose the most suitable cloud provider. For this reason it is necessary to know the needs of the company and, once known, you must take into account the features, additional services and costs involved in one provider or another in order to get the most out of the cloud environment and minimise your costs as much as possible. Not all providers offer the same services, and there are price differences depending on the service and provider you choose. 

Know the KPIs: Before moving anything to the cloud, a baseline analysis of each of your applications should be drawn up. There are many different key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track, depending on the applications running. Here are some common KPIs: load or run speed, average session duration, error rates, etc.

Design an infrastructure strategy: One of the first steps before migrating to the cloud is to build a solid migration architecture, as well as having a strategy that involves all component departments, and to determine whether the company is ready for the process of moving to a new system.

Security: Your company is responsible for your customers’ valuable and confidential data as well as your own. At all times, you need to know where it is and make sure it is safe, so it is important that you are fully aware of the cloud provider’s security policies and standards before you deploy your applications on their platform.

Costs: Before moving your data to the cloud you should consider the costs to the business, such as the total cost of internal resources, infrastructure changes, and timeframes.

To take full advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud, it is important to have a team of experts in cloud infrastructure and development. Geko‘s team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

Contact us to analyse your infrastructure and migrate to the cloud in the most efficient way!

La entrada Steps before migrate to the cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Characteristics to evaluate on-premise vs. cloud

• Security

On-premise servers are more insecure because their system is open by default, as opposed to the cloud, which is closed by default. In addition, the tools provided by cloud storage favour data encryption, access to services and access security protocols. The different cloud providers have PCI-DSS ISO certifications, etc., which endorse their reputation in terms of security.
DevOps and cloud professionals generally manage their clients’ cloud accounts very securely, as we do at Geko cloud to ensure that the entire infrastructure is in good hands, as this is one of our priorities.

• Price

The cloud allows you to make more accurate forecasts in terms of costs, and the savings from purchasing additional hardware are obvious. It is true that in the case of on-premise you can do much of the work internally (which may be a saving in certain cases but not all companies have sufficient knowledge to do so), but in the long run it can mean an unexpected increase in technical maintenance work, management, monitoring and optimisation of performance, and less tangible costs in the long term arising from system downtime or unused licences.
In conclusion, cloud service is more cost-effective, having to pay for a subscription with updates and maintenance.

• Flexibility

Having your platform in the cloud allows you to increase or decrease your services very easily, plus you don’t need installation, support, maintenance and all these details that a physical system would require.

• Movilidad

This is undoubtedly a clear advantage of the cloud. You will have access from anywhere and at any time, and therefore through the Internet any worker can access remotely. This translates into greater agility and productivity when managing information and applications.
Although remote management can also be applied to the on-premise system, physical presence may sometimes be necessary, for which it would be necessary to travel, which would be slower than cloud management.

• Customisation

Both options can be adapted to any type of company or service, but it will be easier to have DevOps experts to help you customise the software and adapt it to your needs. At Geko Cloud we work interchangeably with several cloud providers such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and we adapt the technologies and service to each type of product or company to achieve scalability and more efficient business management.

• Implementation

Implementing on-premises software is more expensive than implementing a cloud application, as it is something that is done on an ad-hoc basis as mentioned above and can take time. In the case of the cloud, it can be done more quickly and customisation can be done over time.

• Energy saving

In the case of on-premise servers, there can be a higher energy cost. In contrast, with the cloud software model, the responsibility lies with the service provider and is part of the package that is contracted. Another detail to take into account will be the generation of economies of scale thanks to the cloud, leading to a reduction in fixed costs as a consequence.

We manage your platform in the cloud

At Geko, we migrate your legacy or hybrid cloud platform and help you design its architecture.

In this post you can read about the advantages of outsourcing DevOps, as well as having a team to manage your migration to the cloud.

Contact us to learn more about our services, we will be happy to assist you and talk about your platform.

La entrada On-premise vs cloud se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Advantages

• Minimal changes to be made: One of the most outstanding features of the lift and shift approach is the lack of need for large-scale changes to both the application and the architecture. The application is completely re-hosted in the cloud using the IAAS platform and therefore no redesign of the application architecture itself is required. As a result, there are no additional costs in migrating to the cloud. Obviously, we will have to control all access to endpoints and dependencies in calls to applications. In this case, we do recommend using all possible SAAS services that provide us with simplicity, such as cache systems, databases, etc.
• Cost savings: Another point to highlight are the costs in the migration model “lift and shift”, as the above-mentioned changes are not required, the costs are reduced. In addition, migrating to the cloud faster also reduces management and maintenance costs, improving business performance.It is important to be clear about this cost associated with hardware maintenance, as it is much more than companies are aware of. Being able to host the legacy platform in a new environment with dynamic growth features allows us to use and pay only for the resources that are really needed instead of having to host it on servers that are sized to the maximum.
• Quick migration: If you want to move all your resources or applications out of the local infrastructure and into a cloud environment quickly, the “lift and shift” model is the solution, as there is no time spent optimizing, changing code, or even making major architectural changes. This advantage is very beneficial for companies that cannot afford long periods of downtime during migration. However, we recommend planning before starting the migration process to the cloud. On the other hand, there are more and more applications that allow us to clone operating systems to export and import them in exactly the same state as they are on-premise.

Disadvantages

• Migration failures: When migrating with a “lift and shift” strategy, it must be taken into account that on-premise architecture is not the same as a cloud architecture, so if organisations do not translate the corresponding application features to the cloud, the cloud migration process is doomed to fail and there will be major problems in the long-term, such as load peaks. This point is ultimately to understand that it is imperative to have control and knowledge about the application(s), their configurations, dependencies, network infrastructure and segmentation, and other characteristics that need to be taken into account.
• Performance problems: Copying applications without making changes means that you will have performance or latency issues after migration, particularly those businesses that use a lot of resources or are based on big data analytics. The cloud brings us dynamic growth, but in the cost matrix, the cloud loses efficiency the more raw computation is needed, or rather, the more resource performance, IO, CPU, RAM the application or product to be deployed requires.
• Security issues: Another disadvantage of not making any changes to the infrastructure is that many of the problems of the previous IT model, such as insecure configurations or malware, will be carried over, which can lead to increased risks after migration. To counteract the inherent inefficiencies, contingency measures must be implemented and, in addition, risk management and security policy compliance must be implemented.
• Not taking 100% of the benefits of the cloud : By keeping the same application architecture, it will not be possible to take advantage of all the benefits that migrating to the cloud can offer, such as scalability, the use of SAAS services and, in short not proceeding with a “cloud-friendly” migration using the resources that the provider makes available to achieve the associated competitive advantages. Many companies have applications or programmes designed in a local environment to cope with increases, such as seasonal peaks. So if you use the “lift and shift” approach, you can’t benefit from the ability to scale the capacity up or down on demand, as well as the speed and agility that the cloud offers. Also, if the application is not optimised for the cloud, it could consume more resources than necessary, and therefore could increase costs in the long run.

The choice of the right migration method is crucial, as every company has different needs. If the “lift and shift” method of migration is finally chosen, not only the advantages (cost-effectiveness, ease and speed) but also the disadvantages (migration failures, additional costs or performance problems) must be taken into account.

To take full advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud, it is important to have a team of experts in cloud infrastructure and development. Geko‘s team has experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.

Contact us to analyse your infrastructure and migrate to the cloud in the most efficient way!

La entrada Cloud migration “lift and shift” se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

If you are considering moving your platform to the cloud, especially in these times where we work more time from home, be sure to read this post and discover the keys to choosing the best cloud solution provider for your business.

Data security

When selecting a cloud provider, it is important to know that it complies with all the regulatory security criteria based on the protection and sovereignty of data as dictated by the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation), in addition, such data must be encrypted both in transit and in storage. Another point to keep in mind is the security certifications held by the cloud solution provider, such as ISO 27001 or ISO 9001. 

There are a number of services that already provide these end-to-end encryption elements implemented as standard, and you will need to know their specifications to implement them correctly, such as bulk data volumes, databases, communications and many others.

In addition, if you are involved in transactions that involve management of payments and confidential data, you are likely to need a PCI-certified provider.

Reliability and Performance

When choosing a cloud service provider, you should first ensure that they have a contingency plan to guarantee uninterrupted service in case of a service breakdown. Knowing this information is of vital importance, as it can lead to loss of customers and loss of revenues.

At this point, the great majority of public cloud providers have several availability zones. We recommend consulting the network topology to find out both the availability zones and the regions of your cloud provider, not only to show their magnitude but also to find out the availability to grow in infrastructure at a global level in order to be close to your end user.

There are several methods to find out how the supplier copes during the downtimes. One of them is to know their SLA for the last 6 to 12 months. The SLA (Service Level Agreement) is an agreement that specifies the services that the cloud provider must offer, such as their response times in case they have to block an attack. This information is usually published, but if this is not the case, they must provide it on request. 

Technical support

Cloud environments are quite complex, so it is important to have a qualified technical staff that can adapt to specific needs, address security issues or support you in the process of deployment and migration to the cloud. 

This point is vital for the peace of mind of your business. Keep in mind that in the situation of a disaster or service discontinuity, working with a cloud provider offers many tools but also makes physical access to its platform impossible, so there will be a moment when you will be at the mercy of its support team, its reliability, transparency and level of maturity.

Infrastructure

The cloud infrastructure is composed of a set of elements: storage, network, hardware, and so on. From this point, we can differentiate between public cloud, private cloud or the combination of both, the hybrid cloud. The current trend is to migrate to hybrid cloud infrastructures, as they include the most important aspects of the previous solutions. One of the characteristics of the hybrid cloud is the storage of data, which is divided between local infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. 

As we mentioned previously, it is very important to know the size and volume of the services to get an idea of the maturity, reliability and growth possibilities that a cloud service provider can offer us. In terms of services, it is very important to know which services are we hosting in the cloud in order to know which services we’ll need to exploit in each case, and see if we are choosing the best provider in each case: Deploying a website in a CMS is not the same as deploying a machine learning platform or a marketplace…

Pricing and transparency

One of the most important points is obviously the monthly cost of using the selected cloud services. The calculators offered by cloud providers, as our clients explain to us, are not as simple and transparent as they could be. Let’s remember that the cloud allows us to grow and eliminate obvious operating costs quickly and resoundingly in exchange for a passed cost, but what do we have to take into account to calculate the costs in advance and have predictability? It’s a good question, cloud costs are affected by a variety of factors such as: volume of storage space, bandwidth, requests per second, outgoing traffic, communications between VPCs, and so on. 

At this point it is necessary to have the advice of specialists who have experience in this area and above all to see if it is a model that fits our pocket and the status of the project.

Finally, in case you are considering different cloud provider options, our cloud and DevOps experts can help you choose the option that best suits your business needs. At Geko we work with different cloud providers, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. In addition, if you need more information, we have compared some characteristics of two of the three most popular cloud providers in our post “AWS vs AZURE, which one should I choose?“, where you will learn some of the differences. 

If you want an expert team to be by your side in the cloud migration process, Geko is the solution. We are a team specialised in cloud development of cloud infrastructures that will advise you on all technologies and will guide you throughout the process from migration to cloud implementation for your company.

Contact us!

La entrada 5 Keys to choosing the best cloud provider se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.