From a cave to the cloud

Using tools has made life easier for people from the dawn of ages. It may have started with the invention of hammers and spears but we’ve come a long way since. The cloud is part of this constant move for innovation to make our life easier. This started with Infrastructure as a Service, and now evolves to Platform as a Service.

A common misconception is that moving to the cloud will magically make your application cloud ready, resolving all issues around reliability and manageability. However, cloud is not a magic bullet. Cloud it is a tool to help you achieve higher reliability with less effort.

A good cloud provider provides cloud services with many built-in redundancies. No single point of hardware failure, be it a compute node, hard-drive failure or network failure affect the performance of a cloud hosted system. However, this doesn’t address the most common cause of failure: software. Not only that, it also ignores the true benefits of cloud computing.

There are numerous benefits to cloud computing that make it a true innovation and not just a fad. The increased scalability, manageability and flexibility enable organisations to move much faster from concept to testing to the final deployment. In other words, organisations can innovate faster!

Go forth and multiply!

One of the true benefits of cloud computing is the ability to scale dynamically without downtime. You can design your application to scale in line with demand, even if demand explodes more than tenfold, without users noticing anything. You can design your application to be cloud ready.

Traditional applications are only designed to scale vertically. If you need more capacity you would increase the amount of CPU power, RAM or hard-disk space. However, to be truly cloud ready, you should design for horizontal scaling. Rather than doubling the size of the server, you automatically deploy an additional cloud server of the same size. This results in a larger capacity and reliability gain than doubling the size would ever achieve. Load balancing in this way provides more compute resources, more bandwidth, more reliability and an overall better user experience.

And rest on the seventh day!

Servers require a lot of TLC. Initially they need to be built & configured, and then they need to be maintained and monitored. This means regularly updating all software to prevent security issues as well as constant performance monitoring.

A proper cloud ready application deployment enables you to automate much of this work. By using a suitable Platform as a Service, you can reduce the time spent on configuration and maintenance by over 75%. For example, starting and configuring an entire database (MySQL or MongoDB) cluster can be done in less than 5 minutes on the cloud. Compare that with the procurement, configuration and maintenance involved in a traditional environment!

On top of that, monitoring is built into a proper Platform as a Service, alerting you if anything goes wrong with your cloud ready application. Combined with self-healing properties, you can rest assured that the cloud platform will automatically provision a new cloud instance from the most recent backup without you even needing to lift a finger. Good news for system administrators tired of being woken up in the middle of the night for a crisis and even better news for the bottom line!

Stay safe! (use protection)

Another important issue to consider is the need to secure your servers. A good Platform as a Service helps keep your data secure. It automatically provides you with access to your data via SSL, to make sure nobody can intercept it. It can also automatically install the minor updates, as these are usually security patches and performance improvements.

A tool to make life easier

Platform as a Service is one of the most recent human inventions to make life easier and make organisations more competitive. Cloud computing is a major leap, and Platform as a Service builds on Infrastructure as a Service to enable cloud ready applications.. It provides flexibility, and that’s what makes all the difference in today’s business reality.

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Note: CloudCentral provides Infrastructure as a Service and on top of that a Platform as a Service as part of its cloud computing services. This open platform enables developers to do three things:

• deploy applications much more easily and quickly,
• spend less time administrating your servers
• Ensure they are truly cloud ready by easily scaling horizontally
• And provide peace of mind without any vendor lock-in.