Why does business need a cloud: an overview of real IaaS usage scenarios

In our blog, we have repeatedly talked about different models of cloud services (for example, here's a topic about corporate IaaS ) and how to evaluate the benefits of moving to the cloud. Today we will talk about what tasks the company really solve with the help of new technologies.

IT for a startup

For the normal functioning of the business these days, a set of basic technology services is needed - an office suite, a data warehouse, their backup and “sharing”, remote access to information, updating the necessary programs, etc.

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Start-up companies are often in conditions of limited resources - they do not have the opportunity to hire a team of IT specialists who would support the infrastructure necessary for the work of the project, and the budget itself is limited to this infrastructure.







To succeed, a startup must focus on what it can do best - create products and services for clients, and not waste time administering different programs and servers. And here the cloud helps to save on the purchase and support of hardware and software - with the growth of a business, the benefits become more tangible.



Here's how the importance of flexible scaling is explained by the members of the PickPoint team, a company that builds automated product delivery systems:

When it all started, server hardware was borrowed for economy. But we quickly came up against the ceiling of its capabilities, and the growth of the load was hardly predictable due to the novelty of the idea on the domestic market. Namayavshis with a constant upgrade of iron, we decided not to pour from empty to empty and turned to cloud technologies.



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At the moment of rapid growth, the pluses of the cloud were fully appreciated - for us, this is primarily a flexible scaling. Even when it is impossible to predict the increase in load and buy it in reserve, you can always “build up the muscles” of virtual systems as needed in a couple of clicks.

Backup Organization

A serious technological problem faced by companies of different sizes is the growth of data - they need to be protected, different methods of reducing the volume, identifying and eliminating outdated information, and implementing backup and recovery solutions from backups.



It is possible to solve it with the help of the cloud - for example, Veeam Cloud Connect technology allows you to save backups to remote cloud sites, and then allows you to restore them directly to the cloud (if the main site has failed). In our blog, we published detailed instructions on how to organize backup to the cloud using the product Veeam Backup & Replication v8.

Providing resources for customers

Another popular cloud usage scenario is to provide certain IT services to customers and partners. Someone needs to place an internal portal or online store for the client, others need to be given the opportunity to work safely with the product in test mode. Such a need may arise, both for small and very large companies.



Boris Gradinger, Director of Information Technology at Eset, said that the company used the cloud to provide customers with the ability to test their products:

We deployed several demo servers of our products on a leased cloud infrastructure. Then, over the course of the year, these servers were provided to our customers as test sites, allowing for a detailed investigation of the capabilities of ESET NOD32 products.

Creating a backup site for infrastructure

Competition in many areas of business is now such that companies cannot allow idle time even in the event of a major failure - customers simply go to competitors. The development of virtualization and cloud computing technologies allows you to organize a disaster-resistant backup platform (Disaster Recovery Solution, DRS) without extra costs.



There are different types of backup data centers (cold, warm, hot reserve) and software products for organizing such solutions - this topic is developed in more detail in this material .

Fight peak loads and allocate resources for temporary projects

Private and hybrid clouds (we told about the different models in more detail about the blog ) can be effectively used to eliminate peak loads (when bursts occur, new virtual servers can be quickly “raised”) and to allocate resources for temporary projects (after their completion the unnecessary infrastructure is turned off to save ).







How moving to the cloud helped the Hotels.ru project to improve the reliability of the infrastructure and cope with peak loads, his team told in a post on Habré:

The whole charm of the IaaS clouds is realized when the traffic on the site increases tenfold before the holidays and the power needs to be urgently raised. At the dawn of the service, this caused a natural panic and an emergency, and now the issue is solved by adding virtual processors and IOPS to the disk system. As soon as the peak was asleep and, according to predictions, repetitions are not foreseen, we disconnect the temporarily allocated capacities in order not to pay extra.

Development and Testing

Another popular use of cloud resources is their use to create development and test environments in which you can safely create and test the health of new projects.







In the case of startups, the ability to save resources is also important - after testing is complete, virtual servers can simply be disabled.

“When working with IaaS, I liked the democratic approach to pricing, which translates into the ability to create copies of your virtual machines, debug them and then delete them, without overpaying for the resources used,” said Dmitry Lukashevich, CEO of the Fitnessbar project

Complete replacement of physical infrastructure

Some even very large companies are more profitable to fully transfer their infrastructure to the cloud than to engage in non-core activities for its construction and support. One example of such major projects is Hamley's retailer of children's toys.







We talked about this project in Habré , but in short, the entire IT infrastructure of the retailer has been located in the cloud for more than four years.

Conclusion

Cloud technology is not a silver bullet that can solve all infrastructure problems. Companies need to analyze their needs in order to understand whether it is worth using virtualization and what exactly can be brought to the cloud.



Also, do not forget that even in the clouds from failures no one is insured - but the likelihood of problems can be reduced by choosing the most reliable provider.



That's all for today, thank you for your attention! Do not forget to get acquainted with the new materials in the first blog about corporate IaaS .