Tag: cloud services

Evolving Operations to Maximize AWS Cloud Native Services

As a Practice Director of Managed Cloud Services, my team and I see well-intentioned organizations fall victim to this very common scenario… Despite the business migrating from its data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its system operations team doesn’t make adjustments for the new environment. The team attempts to continue performing the same activities they did when their physical hardware resided in a data center or at another hosting provider.

The truth is, that modernizing your monolithic applications and infrastructure requires new skill sets, knowledge, expertise, and understanding to get desired results. Unless you’re a sophisticated, well-funded, start-up, most established organizations don’t know where to begin after the migration is complete. The transition from deploying legacy software in your own data center, to utilizing Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and micro-services, while deploying code through an automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, is a whole new ballgame. Not to mention how to keep it functioning after it is deployed.

In this article, I’m providing some insight on how to overcome the stagnation that hits post-migration. With forethought, AWS understanding, and a reality check on your internal capabilities, organizations can thrive with cloud-native services. At the same time, kicking issues downstream, maintaining inefficiencies, and failing to address new system requirements will compromise the ROI and assumed payoffs of modernization.

Is Your Team Prepared?

Sure, going serverless with Lambda might be all the buzz right now, but it’s not something you can effectively accomplish overnight. Running workloads on cloud-native services and platforms requires a different way of operating. New operational demands require that your internal teams are equipped with these new skill sets. Unfortunately, a team that may have mastered the old data center or dedicated hosting provider environment, may not be able to jump in on AWS.

The appeal of AWS is the great flexibility to drive your business and solve unique challenges.  However, because of the ability to provision and decommission on demand, it also introduces new complexities. If these new challenges are not addressed early on, you will definitely see friction between teams which can damage collaboration and adoption, the potential for system sprawl increases, and cost overruns can compromise the legitimacy and longevity of modernization.

Due to the high cost and small talent pool of technically efficient cloud professionals, many organizations struggle to nab the attention of these highly desired employees. Luckily, modern cloud-managed service providers can help you wade through the multitude of services AWS introduces. With a trusted and experienced partner by your side, businesses are able to gain the knowledge necessary to drive business efficiencies and solve unique challenges. Depending on the level of interaction, existing team members may be able to level up to better manage AWS growth going forward. In the meantime, involving a third-party cloud expert is a quick and efficient way to make sure post-migration change management evolves with your goals, design, timeline, and promised outcomes.

Are You Implementing DevOps?

Modern cloud operations and optimizations address the day two necessities that go into the long-term management of AWS. DevOps principles and automation need to be heavily incorporated into how the AWS environment operates. With hundreds of thousands of distinct prices and technical combinations, even the most experienced IT organizations can get overwhelmed.

Consider traditional operations management versus cloud-based DevOps. One is a physical hardware deployment that requires logging into the system to perform configurations, and then deploying software on top. It’s slow, tedious, and causes a lag for developers as they wait for feature delivery, which negatively impacts productivity. Instead of system administrators performing monthly security patching, and having to log into each instance separately, a modern cloud operation can efficiently utilize a pipeline ­with infrastructure as code. Now, you can update your configuration files to use a new image and then use infrastructure automation to redeploy. This treats each one as an ephemeral instance, minimizing any friction or delay on the developer teams.

This is just one example of how DevOps can and should be used to achieve strong availability, agility, and profitability. Measuring DevOps with the CALMS model provides a guideline for addressing the five fundamental elements of DevOps: Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. Learn more about DevOps in our eBook, 7 Major Roadblocks in DevOps Adoption and How to Address Them.

Do You Continue With The Same Behavior?

Monitoring CPU, memory, and disk at the traditional thresholds used on legacy hardware are not necessarily appropriate when utilizing AWS EC2. To achieve the financial and performance benefits of the cloud, you purposely design systems and applications to use and pay for the number of resources required. As you increasingly deploy new cloud-native technology, such as Kubernetes and serverless operations, require that you monitor in different ways so as to reduce an abundance of unactionable alerts that eventually become noise.

For example, when running a Kubernetes cluster, you should implement monitoring that alerts on desired pods. If there’s a big difference between the number of desired pods and currently running pods, this might point to resource problems where your nodes lack the capacity to launch new pods. With a modern managed cloud service provider, cloud operations engineers receive the alert and begin investigating the cause to ensure uptime and continuity for application users. With fewer unnecessary alerts and an escalation protocol for the appropriate parties, triage of the issue can be done more quickly. In many cases remediation efforts can be automated, allowing for more efficient resource allocation.

How Are You Cutting Costs?

Many organizations initiate cloud migration and modernization to gain cost-efficiency. Of course, these financial benefits are only accessible when modern cloud operations are fully in place.

Considering that anyone can create an AWS account but not everyone has visibility or concerns for budgetary costs, it can result in costs exceeding expectations quickly. This is where establishing a strong governance model and expanding automation can help you to achieve your cost-cutting goals. You can limit instance size deployment using IAM policies to insure larger, more expensive instances are not unnecessarily utilized. Another cost that can quickly grow without the proper controls is your S3 storage. Enabling policies to have objects expire and automatically be deleted can help to curb an explosion in storage costs. Enacting policies like these to control costs requires that your organization take the time to think through the governance approach and implement it.

Evolving in the cloud can reduce computing costs by 40-60% while increasing efficiency and performance. However, those results are not guaranteed. Download our eBook, A Holistic Approach to Cloud Cost Optimization, to ensure a cost-effective cloud experience.

How Will You Start Evolving Now?

Time is of the essence when it comes to post-migration outcomes – and the board and business leaders around you will be expecting results. As your organization looks to leverage AWS cloud-native services, your development practices will become more agile and require a more modern approach to managing the environment. To keep up with these business drivers, you need a team to serve as your foundation for evolution.

2nd Watch works alongside organizations to help start or accelerate your cloud journey to become fully cloud native on AWS. With more than 10 years of migrating, operating, and effectively managing workloads on AWS, 2nd Watch can help your operations staff evolve to operate in a modern way with significant goal achievement. Are you ready for the next step in your cloud journey? Contact us and let’s get started.

 


Managed Cloud Services: Optimize, Reduce Costs, and Efficiently Achieve your Business Goals

Cloud adoption is becoming more popular across all industries, as it has proven to be reliable, efficient, and more secure as a software service. As cloud adoption increases, companies are faced with the issue of managing these new environments and their operations, ultimately impacting day-to-day business operations. Not only are IT professionals faced with the challenge of juggling their everyday work activities with managing their company’s cloud platforms but must do so in an timely, cost-efficient manner. Often, this requires hiring and training additional IT people—resources that are getting more and more difficult to find.

This is where a managed cloud service provider, like 2nd Watch, comes in.

What is a Managed Cloud Service Provider?

Managing your cloud operations on your own can seem like a daunting, tedious task that distracts from strategic business goals. A cloud managed service provider (MSP) monitors and maintains your cloud environments relieving IT from the day-to-day cloud operations, ensuring your business operates efficiently. This is not to say IT professionals are incapable of performing these responsibilities, but rather, outsourcing allows the IT professionals within your company to concentrate on the strategic operations of the business. In other words, you do what you do best, and the service provider takes care of the rest.

The alternative to an MSP is hiring and developing within your company the expertise necessary to keep up with the rapidly evolving cloud environment and cloud native technologies. Doing it yourself factors in a hiring process, training, and payroll costs.

While possible, maintaining your cloud environments internally might not be the most feasible option in the long run. Additionally, a private cloud environment can be costly and requires your applications are handled internally. Migrating to the public cloud or adopting hybrid cloud model allows companies flexibility, as they allow a service provider either partial or full control of their network infrastructure.

What are Managed Cloud Services?

Managed cloud services are the IT functions you give your service provider to handle, while still allowing you to handle the functions you want. Some examples of the management that service providers offer include:

  • Managed cloud database: A managed database puts some of your company’s most valuable assets and information into the hands of a complete team of experienced Database Administrators (DBAs). DBAs are available 24/7/365 to perform tasks such as database health monitoring, database user management, capacity planning and management, etc.
  • Managed cloud security services: The public cloud has many benefits, but with it also comes security risks. Security management is another important MSP service to consider for your business. A cloud managed service provider can prevent and detect security threats before they occur, while fully optimizing the benefits provided by a cloud environment.
  • Managed cloud optimization: The cloud can be costly, but only as costly as you allow it to be. An MSP can optimize cloud spend through consulting, implementation, tools, reporting services, and remediation.
  • Managed governance & compliance: Without proper governance, your organization can be exposed to security vulnerabilities. Should a disaster occur within your business, such as a cyberattack on a data center, MSPs offer disaster recovery services to minimize recovery downtime and data loss. A managed governance and compliance service with 2nd Watch helps your Chief Security and Compliance Officers maintain visibility and control over your public cloud environment to help achieve on-going, continuous compliance.

At 2nd Watch, our foundational services include a fully managed cloud environment with 24/7/365 support and industry leading SLAs. Our foundational services address the key needs to better manage spend, utilization, and operations.

What are the Benefits of a Cloud Managed Service Provider?

Using a Cloud Managed Service Provider comes with many benefits if you choose the right one.

Some of these benefits include, but are not limited to: 

  • Cost savings: MSPs have experts that know how to efficiently utilize the cloud, so you get the most out of your resources while reducing cloud computing costs.
  • Increased data security: MSPs ensure proper safeguards are utilized while proactively monitoring and preventing potential threats to your security.
  • Increased employee production: With less time spent managing the cloud, your IT managers can focus on the strategic business operations.
  • 24/7/365 management: Not only do MSPs take care of cloud management for you but do so 100% of the time.
  • Overall business improvement: When your cloud infrastructure is managed by a trusted cloud advisor, they can optimize your environments while simultaneously allowing time for you to focus on core business operations. They can also recommend cloud native solutions to further support the business agility required to compete.

Why Our Cloud Management Platform?

With cloud adoption increasing in popularity, choosing a managed cloud service provider to help with this process can be overwhelming. While there are many options, choosing one you can trust is important to the success of your business. 2nd Watch provides multi-cloud management across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and has a special emphasis of putting our customers before the cloud. Additionally, we use industry standard, cloud native tooling to prevent platform lock in.

The solutions we create at 2nd Watch are tailored to your business needs, creating a large and lasting impact on our clients. For example:

  • On average, 2nd Watch saves customers 41% more than if they managed the cloud themselves (based on customer data)
  • Customers experience increased efficiency in launching applications, adding an average 240 hours of productivity per year for your business
  • On average, we save customers 21% more than our competitors

Next Steps

2nd Watch helps customers at every step in their cloud journey, whether that’s cloud adoption or optimizing your current cloud environment to reduce costs. We can effectively manage your cloud, so you don’t have to. Contact us to get the most out of your cloud environment with a managed cloud service provider you can trust.

-Tessa Foley, Marketing


Datacenter Migration to the Cloud: Why Your Business Should Do it and How to Plan for it

Datacenter migration is ideal for businesses who are looking to exit or reduce on-premises datacenters, migrate workloads as is, modernize apps, or leave another cloud. Executing migrations, however, is no small task, and as a result, there are many enterprise workloads that still run in on-premises datacenters. Often technology leaders want to migrate more of their workloads and infrastructure to a private or public cloud, but they are turned off by the seemingly complex processes and strategies involved in cloud migration or lack the internal cloud skills necessary to make the transition.

 

Though datacenter migration can be a daunting business initiative, the benefits of moving to the cloud are well worth the effort, and the challenges of the migration process can be mitigated by creating a strategy, using the correct tools, and utilizing professional services. Datacenter migration provides a great opportunity to revise, rethink, and improve an organization’s IT architecture. It also ultimately impacts business-critical drivers such as reducing capital expenditure, decreasing ongoing cost, improving scalability and elasticity, improving time-to-market, enacting digital transformation, and attaining improvements in security and compliance.

What are Common Datacenter Migration Challenges?

To ensure a seamless and successful migration to the cloud, businesses should be aware of the potential complexities and risks associated with a datacenter migration. The complexities and risks are addressable, and if addressed properly, organizations can create not only an optimal environment for their migration project, but provide the launch point for business transformation.

Not Understanding Workloads

While cloud platforms are touted as flexible, it is a service-oriented resource and should be treated as such. To be successful in cloud deployment, organizations need to be aware of performance, compatibility, performance requirements (including hardware, software, and IOPS), required software, and adaptability to changes in their workloads. Teams need to run their cloud workloads on the cloud service that is best aligned with the needs of the application and the business.

Not Understanding Licensing

Cloud marketplaces allow businesses to easily “rent” software at an hourly rate. Though the ease of this purchase is enticing, it’s important to remember that it’s not the only option out there. Not all large vendors offer licensing mobility for all applications outside the operating system. In fact, companies should leverage existing relationships with licensing brokers. Just because a business is migrating to the cloud doesn’t mean that a business should abandon existing licensing channels. Organizations should familiarize themselves with their choices for licensing to better maximize ROI.

Not Looking for Opportunities to Incorporate PaaS

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model where a cloud service provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet versus a build-it-yourself Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. The PaaS provider abstracts everything—servers, networks, storage, operating system software, databases, development tools—enabling teams to focus on their application. This enables PaaS customers to build, test, deploy, run, update and scale applications more quickly and inexpensively than they could if they had to build out and manage an IaaS environment on top of their application. While businesses shouldn’t feel compelled to rewrite all their network configurations and operating environments, they should see where they can have quick PaaS wins to replace aging systems.

Not Proactively Preparing for Cloud Migration

Building a new datacenter is a major IT event and usually goes hand-in-hand with another significant business event, such as an acquisition, or outgrowing the existing datacenter. In the case of moving to a new on-premises datacenter, the business will slow down as the company takes on a physical move. Migrating to the cloud is usually not coupled with an eventful business change, and as a result, business does not stop when a company chooses to migrate to the cloud. Therefore, a critical part of cloud migration success is designing the whole process as something that can run along with other IT changes that occur on the same timeline. Application teams frequently adopt cloud deployment practices months before their systems actually migrate to the cloud. By doing so, the team is ready before their infrastructure is even prepared, which makes cloud migration a much smoother event. Combining cloud events with other changes in this manner will maximize a company’s ability to succeed.

Treating and Running the Cloud Environment Like Traditional Datacenters

It seems obvious that cloud environments should be treated differently from traditional datacenters, but this is actually a common pitfall for organizations to fall in. For example, preparing to migrate to the cloud should not include traditional datacenter services, like air conditioning, power supply, physical security, and other datacenter infrastructure, as a part of the planning. Again, this may seem very obvious, but if a business is used to certain practices, it can be surprisingly difficult to break entrenched mindsets and processes.

How to Plan for a Datacenter Migration

While there are potential challenges associated with datacenter migration, the benefits of moving from physical infrastructures, enterprise datacenters, and/or on-premises data storage systems to a cloud datacenter or a hybrid cloud system is well worth the effort.

Now that we’ve gone over the potential challenges of datacenter migration, how do businesses enable a successful datacenter migration while effectively managing risk?

Below, we’ve laid out a repeatable high-level migration strategy that is broken down into four phases: Discovery, Planning, Execution, and Optimization. By leveraging a repeatable framework as such, organizations create the opportunity to identify assets, minimize migration costs and risks using a multi-phased migration approach, enable deployment and configuration, and finally, optimize the end state.

Phase 1: Discovery

During the Discovery phase, companies should understand and document the entire datacenter footprint. This means understanding the existing hardware mapping, software applications, storage layers (databases, file shares), operating systems, networking configurations, security requirements, models of operation (release cadence, how to deploy, escalation management, system maintenance, patching, virtualization, etc.), licensing and compliance requirements, as well as other relevant assets.

The objective of this phase is to have a detailed view of all relevant assets and resources of the current datacenter footprint.

The key milestones in the Discovery phase are:

  • Creating a shared datacenter inventory footprint: Every team and individual who is a part of the datacenter migration to the cloud should be aware of the assets and resources that will go live.
  • Sketching out an initial cloud platform foundations design: This involves identifying centralized concepts of the cloud platform organization such as folder structure, Identity and Access Management (IAM)  model, network administration model, and more.

As a best practice, companies should engage in cross-functional dialogue within their organizations, including teams from IT to Finance to Program Management, ensuring everyone is aligned on changes to support future cloud processes. Furthermore, once a business has migrated from a physical datacenter to the cloud, they should consider whether their datacenter team is trained to support the systems and infrastructure of the cloud provider.

Phase 2: Planning

When a company is entering the Planning phase, they are leveraging the assets and deliverables gathered in the Discovery phase to create migration waves to be sequentially deployed into non-production and production environments.

Typically, it is best to target non-production migration waves first, which helps identify the sequence of waves to migrate first. To start, consider the following:

  • Mapping the current server inventory to the cloud platform’s machine types: Each current workload will generally run on a virtual machine type with similar computing power, memory, and disk. Oftentimes though, the current workload is overprovisioned, so each workload should be evaluated to ensure that it is migrated onto the right VM for that given workload.
  • Timelines: Businesses should lay out their target dates for each migration project.
  • Workloads in each grouping: Figure out what migration waves are grouped by i.e. non-production vs. production applications.
  • The cadence of code releases: Factor in any upcoming code releases as this may impact the decision of whether to migrate sooner or later.
  • Time for infrastructure deployment and testing: Allocate adequate time for testing infrastructures before fully moving over to the cloud.
  • The number of application dependencies: Migration order should be influenced by the number of application dependencies. The applications with the fewest dependencies are generally good candidates for migration first. In contrast, wait to migrate an application that depends on multiple databases.
  • Migration complexity and risk: Migration order should also take complexity into consideration. Tackling simpler aspects of the migration first will generally yield a more successful migration.

As mentioned above, the best practice for migration waves is to start with more predictable and simple workloads. For instance, companies should start with migrating file shares first, then databases and domain controlled, and save the apps for last. However, sometimes the complexity and dependencies don’t allow for a straightforward migration. In these cases, utilizing an experienced service provider who has experience with these complex environments will be prudent.

Phase 3: Execution

Once companies have developed a plan, they can bring them to fruition in the Execution phase. Here, businesses will need to be deliberate about the steps they take and the configurations they develop.

In the Execution phase, companies will put into place infrastructure components and ensure they are configured appropriately, like IAM, networking, firewall rules, and Service Accounts. Here is also where teams should test the applications on the infrastructure configurations to ensure that they have access to their databases, file shares, web servers, load balancers, Active Directory servers, and more. Execution also includes using logging and monitoring to ensure applications continue to function with the necessary performance.

In order for the Execution phase to be successful, there needs to be agile application debugging and testing. Moreover, organizations should have both a short and long-term plan for resolving blockers that may come up during the migration. The Execution phase is iterative and the goal should be to ensure that applications are fully tested on the new infrastructure.

Phase 4: Optimization

The last phase of a datacenter migration project is Optimization. After a business has migrated its workloads to the cloud, it should conduct periodic reviews and planning to optimize the workloads. Optimization includes the following activities:

  • Resizing machine types and disks
  • Leveraging software like Terraform for more agile and predictable deployments
  • Improving automation to reduce operational overhead
  • Bolstering integration with logging, monitoring, and alerting tools
  • Adopting managed services to reduce operational overhead

Cloud services provide visibility into resource consumption and spending, and organizations can more easily identify the compute resources they are paying for. Additionally, businesses can identify virtual machines they need or don’t need. By migrating from a traditional datacenter environment to a cloud environment, teams will be able to optimize their workloads due to the powerful tools that cloud platforms provide.

How do I take the first step in datacenter migration?

While undertaking a full datacenter migration is a significant project, it is worthwhile. The migration framework we’ve provided can help any business break down the process into manageable stages and move fully to the cloud.

When you’re ready to take the first step, we’re here to help to make the process even easier. Contact a 2nd Watch advisor today to get started with your migration to the cloud.

 


Cloud for New Users | The 4 Most Important Lessons Learned Over a Decade

Over the past ten years we’ve learned quite a bit about cloud migration and achieving success across various platforms. Over that time, a lot has changed, and ongoing innovations continue to provide new opportunities for the enterprise. Here, we’re recapping the four most important lessons we’ve learned for new cloud users.

1. Close the knowledge gap

With the rate of innovation in the cloud, the knowledge gap is wider than ever, but that innovation has reduced complexity in many ways. To maximize these innovations, businesses must incentivize employees to continue developing new skills.

Certifications and a desire to continue learning and earning credentials are the traits businesses want in their IT employees. Fostering a company culture that encourages experimentation, growth, and embracing new challenges creates an environment that helps employees develop to the next level.

At 2nd Watch, we create a ladder of success that challenges associates to move from intermediate to advanced capabilities. We foster employees’ natural inclinations and curiosities to build on their passions. Exposing people to new opportunities is a great way to invest in their aptitudes and backgrounds to evolve with the company. One way to do this is by setting up a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), a multi-stakeholder group that includes subject matter experts from various areas of the business. With the multi-skilled group, the collective become the subject matter experts in cloud services and solutions. By setting up a CCOE, silos are eliminated and teams work together in an iterative fashion to promote the cloud as a transformative tool.

2. Assemble the right solutions

Cloud is not always cheaper. If you migrate to the cloud without mapping to the right solutions, you risk increasing cost. For example, if you come from a monolithic architectural environment, it can be tempting to try and recreate that architecture in the cloud.

But, different than your traditional on-prem environment, many resources in the cloud do not require a persistent state. You have the freedom to allow jobs like big data and ETL (extract, transform and load) to run just once a day, rather than 24 hours a day. If you need it for an hour, spin it up for the hour, access your data in your cloud provider’s storage area, then turn it off to minimize usage and costs.

You can also perform simple tweaks to your architecture to improve performance. We recommend exploring containerization and serverless models to implement automation where possible. New cloud users should adapt to the new environment to allow for future use cases, provision resources for future states, and use assets based on scalability. Cloud allows you to map solutions to scale. Partners like 2nd Watch help create a roadmap based on forecasting from current usage.

3. Combine services based on desired outcomes

There is a plethora of cloud service options available, and the way you use them should be driven by the outcomes you want. Are you looking to upgrade? Lift and shift? Advance the business forward? Once you have a clear outcome defined, you can begin your cloud journey with that goal in mind and start planning how best to use each cloud service.

4. Take an active role in the shared responsibility model

In traditional IT environments, security falls solely on the company, but as a cloud user, the model is significantly different. Many cloud service providers utilize a shared security responsibility model where both the cloud provider and the user take ownership over different areas of security.

Often times, cloud providers can offer more security than your traditional datacenter environment ever could. For example, you are not even permitted to see your cloud provider’s data center. Their locations are not known to the public, nor is where your customer data resides known to the datacenter employees.

Although your cloud provider handles much of the heavy lifting, it’s your responsibility to architect your applications correctly. You need to ensure your data is being put into the appropriate areas with the proper roles and responsibilities for access.

Are you ready to explore your options in the cloud? Contact 2nd Watch to learn more about migration, cloud enabled automation, and our multi-layered approach to security.

-Ian Willoughby, Chief Architect and Skip Barry, Executive Cloud Enablement Director