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Reasons to Move, and Reasons Not to Move, to the Public Cloud

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Reasons to Move, and Reasons Not to Move, to the Public Cloud Public cloud adoption is more popular now than ever. Companies across all industries are modernizing their environments to support remote work, lower costs, and improve reliability. In fact, Gartner predicts global public cloud end-user spending to increase by 23% in 2021. Despite this momentum, it’s important to realize the public cloud isn’t an ideal fit for every organization. Many companies rushed into the cloud during the pandemic without fully understanding the implications. Now, issues are surfacing — and some businesses are reconsidering their migration altogether. This post explores the pros and cons of moving to the public cloud. Keep reading to learn more about whether the cloud makes sense for your business, and the reasons to move, and reasons not to move, to the public cloud. What Is the Public Cloud? The public cloud is a framework that lets you access on-demand computing services and infrastructure through a third-party provider. In a public cloud environment, you’ll share the same hardware, software, and network services as other companies or tenants. It’s different from a private cloud environment where your company receives access to private, hosted infrastructure and services. To illustrate, it’s like staying in a hotel versus renting a private cottage on Airbnb. A few of the top public cloud providers on the market include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud. Public cloud services can refer to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) models. Top Reasons for Public Cloud Adoption Companies have a variety of reasons for migrating to the public cloud. Here’s a few of them. Replacing the Data Center and Lowering Computing Costs Enterprises are increasingly moving away from data centers. In fact, by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. Companies with aging data centers can avoid retrofitting facilities or building new ones by migrating to the public cloud and leveraging hosted infrastructure instead. This greatly reduces costly builds and minimizes operational expenses. Achieving Rapid Scalability The public cloud enables rapid scalability. You can significantly increase storage and compute power through the public cloud at a fraction of the cost of expanding your existing infrastructure. The public cloud is particularly useful for growing startups that need to be able to accommodate massive usage increases. It’s also ideal for organizations that experience seasonal spikes in sales. For example, an e-commerce provider might use the public cloud when ramping up production and sales around the holidays. By the same token, the public cloud provides flexibility to easily scale back down during lulls. Accessing Managed Services The service provider manages the underlying hardware and software in a public cloud deployment. They also typically provide security, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades. This approach enables you to take a hands-off approach to managing infrastructure. Your IT team can focus on other business needs, with the expectation that the public cloud provider will keep your services up and running within the scope of the service-level agreement (SLA). Reducing IT Burden Right now, there’s a widespread IT staffing shortage. The issue is particularly bad in the data center industry, where 50% of data center owners and operators are having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs. If your company’s having a hard time finding qualified IT workers, you may want to consider outsourcing operations to the public cloud. This can free your IT workers from grunt work and enable them to take on more valuable projects. At the same time, your IT team can still manage its public cloud environment. For example, they can still perform data governance and identity and access management (IAM). They just won’t have to worry about maintaining or upgrading any hardware or software.  Strengthening Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Another reason why companies migrate to the cloud is to improve their BC/DR posture. Business continuity involves establishing a plan to deal with unexpected challenges like service outages. Disaster recovery is all about restoring network access following an issue like a cyberattack or natural disaster. Companies often rely on the public cloud to establish BC and DR across two or more geographically separate locations. Running a BC/DR strategy through the cloud is much more efficient, as it prevents you from having to maintain a fully functioning recovery site 24/7. This approach drastically reduces costs. At the same time, using the public cloud can guarantee full operational BC/DR availability. This can provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can keep your business running when emergency strikes. Why Companies Avoid the Public Cloud Without a doubt, the public cloud offers several exciting advantages for businesses. But there are also a few major drawbacks to consider. Here are some of the top reasons why companies might avoid the public cloud. Higher Costs Companies often expect instant cost savings when migrating to the cloud. In reality, cloud services can sometimes be more expensive than on-premises data centers — at least at first. Oftentimes, companies fail to achieve true cost savings until they learn how to take full advantage of the public cloud. This can take months or years. It’s important to carefully break down cloud migration costs and ROI before moving to the public cloud to get an accurate understanding of the move’s short-, medium-, and long-term financial impact. In some cases, companies find they fare better with their existing setups. Data Ownership Concerns Right now, there’s an ongoing debate about who owns data in the public cloud. Some cloud providers attempt to retain ownership of some or all of the data they store. As such, many business leaders fear storing data in the public cloud, and some simply can’t risk it. Instead, they choose to avoid the issue by using their own dedicated infrastructure. It’s a good idea to talk with your team before migrating to the public cloud and conduct a security and privacy

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Rise of “Service Mesh” in Application Modernisation – White Paper.

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Rise of “Service Mesh” in Application Modernisation  The What, the Why and the How  Author:  Ravi Cheetirala Technical Architect ( Cloud & DevSecOps) at TL Consulting Learn how Service Mesh brings the safety and reliability in all the aspects of service communication. Read on to find out more about the following: What is a Service Mesh? Key Features of a Service Mesh Why do we need Service Mesh? How does it work? Case Study What is Service Mesh? A Service Mesh is programmable piece of software layer sits on tops of the services in a Kubernetes cluster. Which helps to effective management of service-to-service communication, also called as “East-West” traffic.  The objective of Service mesh is to allow services to securely communicate to each other, share data and redirect traffic in the event of application/service failures. Quite often service mesh will be an overlay of network load balancer, API gateway and network security groups.  Key Features of Service Mesh  Traffic Routing  Rate Limiting, Ingress Gateway, traffic splitting, service discovery, circuit breaking, and service retry  Service mesh helps in enabling the traffic routing between the services in one or more clusters. It also helps in resolving some of the cross-cutting concerns like service discovery, circuit breaking, traffic splitting.  Securing the Services  Authentication, Authorization, encryption and decryption, Zero Trust Security  The service mesh can also encrypt and decrypt the data in transit, by removing the complexity from each of the services. The usual implementation for encrypting traffic is mutual TLS, where a public key infrastructure (PKI) generates and distributes certificates and keys for use by the sidecar proxies. It can also authenticate and authorize requests made within and outside the app, sending only authorized requests to instances.  Observability   Monitoring, Event Management, Logging, Tracing (M.E.L.T)   Service Mesh comes with lot of monitoring and tracing plugins out of the box to understand and trace the issues like communication latency errors, service failures, routing issues. It captures the telemetry data of the service calls, including the access logs, error rates, no of requests served per second, which will be the base for the operators/developers to troubleshoot and fix the errors. Some of the out of box plugins include Kiali, Jaeger and Grafana.    Why do we need Service Mesh?  Evidently most of the new age applications or existing monolith applications are being transformed or written using the microservice architecture style and deployed in a Kubernetes cluster as a cloud native application because they offer agility, speed, and flexibility. However, the exponential growth of services in this architecture brings challenges in peer-to-peer communication, data encryption, securing the traffic and so on.  Adopting the service mesh pattern helps in addressing these issues of microservice application particular the traffic management between the services, which involves a considerable amount of manual workaround. Service mesh brings the safety and reliability in all the aspects of service communication.  How does it work?   Most of the service meshes are implemented based on a Side Car pattern, where a side car proxy named “Envoy Proxy” will be injected into the Pods. Sidecars can handle tasks abstracted from the service itself, such as monitoring and security.  Services, and their respective envoy proxies and their interactions, is called the data plane in a service mesh. Another layer called the control plane manages tasks such as creating instances, monitoring and implanting policies, such as network management or network security policies. Control plane is the brain behind the service mesh operations.  A Case Study Client Profile  The client in question is one of the large online retailers with global presence. The application is legacy e-commerce platform built as a giant monolith application.  Client’s architecture consists of a multi-channel (mobile and web) front end application developed using React JS and tied together using a backend service developed using legacy Java/J2EE technology and hosted on their own data center.  There is an ongoing project to split this giant app into a microservice based architecture using the latest technical stack and hosted onto a public cloud.  Client’s Organization needed to setup a deployment platform, which ensures high availability and scalable and resilient. Also, it should have cost effective, secure and high deployment frequency when it comes to release and maintenance.  Project Goals  Zero Downtime/No Outage deployments and support of various deployment strategies to test the new release/features.  Improved deployment frequency  Secure communication between the services   Tracing the service-to-service communication response times and troubleshooting the performance bottlenecks  Everything as a code  Role of Service Mesh in the project:  The client was able to achieve the goals by adopting the service mesh pattern in their micro service architecture.  Achieved Zero downtime deployments with 99.99% availability.  Enabled the secure communication using service mesh’s TLS/mTLs feature in a language-agnostic way.  Using traffic splitting they were able to test the new features and sentiment in their customer base.  Chaos testing was conducted using the service mesh fault injection features.  Operational efficiency and infrastructure cost optimization.  Helped to understand the latency issues, by distributed tracing.  No additional burden on Development teams to write code to manage these.  Conclusion  Service mesh provides robust set of features in resolving the key challenges and issues faced by the DevOps and, SREs in a microservice applications on cloud native stack by abstracting most of its functionality. And now it is widely adopted pattern and critically used component in a Kubernetes implementation.  TL Consulting can help by solving these complex technology problems by simplifying IT engineering and delivery. We are an industry leader delivering specialised solutions and advisory in DevOps, Data Migration & Quality Engineering with Cloud at the core. If you want to find out more, please review our application modernisation services page or contact us.

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VMware Tanzu and TL Consulting Partnership

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VMware Tanzu Partnership Modernize your applications and infrastructure to deliver better software to production, continuously. TL Consulting is proud to be a VMware partner and is focussed on Modern Applications, using VMware Tanzu as the technology of choice to manage them in multi-cloud and native cloud environments. Free your apps Microservices, containers and Kubernetes help to free apps from infrastructure, enabling them to work independently and run anywhere. With VMware Tanzu, you can make the most of these cloud native patterns, automate the delivery of containerised workloads, and proactively manage apps in production. It’s all about freeing developers to do their thing: build great apps. Your challenge is to speed up the pace of innovation while reducing cost and lowering risk. There’s a proven way to do this: Adopt modern software development methodologies and more efficient cloud computing models. VMware Tanzu customers are achieving results like this: 400% faster release velocity 83% fewer incidents 80% faster security patching 60% reduction in infrastructure costs to transition into a Cloud Native environment. Why TL Consulting? A VMware Tanzu implementation by TL Consulting will enable your organisation to deliver lasting change and grow through highly differentiated digital experiences. Our team of competitively priced onshore engineers specialises in native cloud and app modernisation, and works closely with their VMware counterparts to devise and implement Tanzu solutions that address specific problem statements and challenges that our customers are encountering. The image below provides a high level overview of our services offered for each edition. VMWare Tanzu offers three editions Basic, Standard and Advanced to get you started. Learn More about VMware Tanzu and TL Consulting Find out more about how TL Consulting can help you on your Tanzu journey. Our work always begins with a complimentary discussion on how we might help you. Click here to view our Tanzu services.

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How to modernise legacy applications

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How to modernise legacy applications Hosting applications on the cloud is a strategic objective for most organisations. There are many benefits to modernise legacy applications and implementing enablers such as automated deployments, auto-scaling and containerised architectures. These include lower running costs and better performance. However, there is a perception that many legacy systems and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications cannot be modernised. Instead, organisations opt for a “Lift and Shift” approach which not only requires a significant amount of rework and refactoring but does not deliver any of the benefits of the cloud. Consider an alternative to lift and shift While a “Lift and Shift” approach is an affordable option, there are often additional costs. These costs are generally not in the initial estimates. When estimating costs, the overall vision of the application and its lifecycle needs to be considered. As does the Total Cost of Ownership after deployment. When these factors are included the cost will often be more than first expected. But higher cost is not the only factor to consider. A lift and shift approach often does not deliver the benefits of moving to the cloud such as performance improvements and deployment efficiencies. As an alternative, monolithic applications can benefit from modern architectures such as Kubernetes, without rearchitecting the solution. An option that few organisations consider or have the skills to accomplish. This provides the same benefits as a “Lift and Shift” but at the same time, provides a model that enables a relatively mature cloud native application. A white paper and case study In the following sections, we will explore key findings from a recent application modernisation service provided to a NSW Government agency. In this white paper we describe how we successfully migrated a legacy Oracle SOA application stack to containerised infrastructure. We explore common challenges, solution design, the implementation and business benefits too. Common Challenges in Modernising Monolithic Applications A main difference between monolithic and microservices architectures, apart from the obvious scalability, flexibility and agility benefits that are achieved with microservices, is that monolithic applications are built of layers and components that are tightly coupled. Putting all these layers and components in one docker container does not at first sight seem like a viable option. Such an approach appears to be adding an external shell on top of the existing layers, thereby further complicating the build process. Also, from a scalability perspective, what if the consumption of the different components were not uniform? In other words, only few of the components would need to be replicated instead of replicating complete layers. It will be a complete waste of infrastructure resources having to replicate all the components when only a few are in high demand. Solution Design Stage Firstly, the engineering teams needed to assess the feasibility of decoupling the application components and explore different architecture design options. Secondly, we evaluated data segregation based on the needs of Docker containers. The next step of the design stage shows the different deployment models highlighting their respective advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the infrastructure, there are different options that can be considered. Another aspect that may need consideration is stateful versus stateless components. With technologies like docker and Kubernetes, running stateless workloads is easier compared to Stateful. The Solution Design Stage is important to setting up the core foundation of the modernised application. Without this assessment, key issues with the code, technology and or architecture will not be identified. In turn, the application will inherit the technical debt thus not achieving the ROI of the project. We often hear from other clients that TCO has risen due to poor analysis of an applications current state. Implementation Stage During the implementation stage there were many considerations to address. We needed to have robust continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines to ensure stage gates are controlled and governed. This approach enabled the teams to have the transparency that was unfortunately lacking within the current technology stack. Infrastructure as code, cost benefit analysis, team skill levels and workflows were among other considerations, risks and issues to overcome. The image below shows a simplified version of the solution pipelines and technology stack. Figure 1 The Design that was implemented for our client needed to address three critical issues. The first issue was a manual activity requiring an engineer to switch a malfunctioning active node to a standby node. The second issue, was overcoming the substantial costs of the previous lift and shift implementation. The cost of provisioning and maintaining the different environments for the platform exceeded that of running it on VMs. The last main issue was scalability. Adding another node group to the platform to handle extra load was an onerous process, which required extensive planning prior to implementation. It is important to note, the infrastructure components and workloads were compliant with the mandated government policies and the government data centre models. Outcomes and Business Benefits Our client realised the immediate benefit of implementing an engineering model that leveraged an infrastructure-as-code pipeline and Kubernetes. Automated build/test/deploy pipelines, Self-Healing, Auto-scaling and 0% Downtime gradual deployments were just a few benefits that helped our client move towards a cloud-native approach. A Cloud-Native Partner While most internal engineers know the business and product well enough to perform a “Lift and Shift” approach, to modernise legacy applications effectively requires specialised DevOps knowledge. TL Consulting can provide this expertise allowing your team to get as close as possible to cloud native models when migrating your legacy systems to the cloud. If you want to find out more, please review our application modernisation services page or contact us below.

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