IaaS for business: How Russian business moves to the “cloud”
Today, many companies are deciding to switch to cloud technologies, as they help to solve and optimize many tasks. Clouds and the transfer of work to outsource to avoid a number of significant problems that one way or another faces a business.
In 2015, a study was conducted in which over 250,000 members of the information security community on LinkedIn took part. The vast majority (71% of respondents) either plan to adapt cloud technologies for work, or are already actively using them.
/ Photo by Leonardo Rizzi CC
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If you have ever had to deal with the formation of the IT budget, then you know that sometimes it is very difficult to explain to management why it is necessary to allocate just such a sum for the purchase of new equipment or an upgrade of the old one. The user base is increasing, “hardware” is becoming obsolete - all this translates into considerable expenses. Such a scheme is difficult to scale and predict the load, especially if the company only enters the market.
In the case of a cloud system, scaling does not cause any difficulties. If the load was calculated incorrectly, then you can easily increase or decrease the number of processors and the amount of allocated memory. In other words, cloud technologies allow you to pay only for the resources that you actually use. When the whole system is in the cloud, the concept of a physical server disappears. This allows you to move services from one server to another without causing disruptions.
There is an opinion that only technology companies can start using cloud systems. However, this is not the case. For example, not so long ago, the largest supplier of sports nutrition in Russia, the company FitnessBar (FitnessBar.ru), moved to the cloud. Initially, the project was conceived as an online store, but the great demand for goods “stimulated” the development of the service and pushed for the opening of the retail network (and the transition to cloud technology).
A terminal server was used to provide access to the single 1C FitnessBar database, however, the equipment could not cope with the sharply increased number of users. The management of the company decided to transfer the infrastructure to the cloud. As a server operating system, FitnessBar used Windows Server 2008R2 and the 1C file version of the database. After some time, the transition was made to the tandem of MS Windows Server + MS SQL, which was later replaced by Debian GNU / Linux and PostgreSQL. The latter option is not demanding of resources and will allow for a long time to increase the user base without degrading performance.
As a virtualization platform, the company uses VMware vCloud in the IT-GRAD cloud. The cloud structure of “IT-GRAD” is based on VMware solutions that provide the “three nines” availability level. Moreover, the cloud is distributed among the most reliable data centers in Russia, among which we can highlight the DataSpace, which has the Tier III reliability level according to the classification developed by the Uptime Institute. Tier III allows multi-user data centers to conduct scheduled repairs and equipment replacement without stopping services, which has a positive effect on user experience.
Another important component of the work of the remote FitnessBar unit is e-mail. E-mail clients have been configured to work over IMAP with the Alt-N MDaemon Messaging Server - this is a full-featured, reliable and secure messaging solution. In general, as Anton Shushunov, System Administrator of FitnessBar, says, the transition to the cloud fully justified itself: “The overall impressions of the work are positive. The allocation of resources is quite transparent, and we have enough performance. "
Another company that moved to the cloud is the Delivery Club food delivery service. Yevgeny Salnikov, CIO of the Delivery Club, says that the transition was due to the need to dynamically adjust resources for the load. The choice of the company fell on the IT-GRAD IaaS-cloud in connection with the entry into force of the law on the storage of personal data and the need to choose a hosting provider in the Russian Federation. “IT-GRAD” is one of the few cloud providers of such a level that has all the necessary licenses for our cloud option, ” notes Eugene.
It is also worth mentioning the company PickPoint, which organized the first network of postamats in Russia. The service has been living in the cloud for five years. A postamat is a parcel terminal for receiving goods ordered via the Internet, acting as an alternative to the postal service.
Postamat PickPoint
The basis of the post office is a PC running Windows Embedded with a router and a controller responsible for opening the cell door. Each postamat is connected to the application server via VPN. According to the company, in order to eliminate system hangs (related to the fact that processing requests, checking orders and fees is performed online), it was decided to organize a second application server with IIS.
At some point, PickPoint needed to transfer the infrastructure to the Moscow data center. “The fact is that the office of the company is located in Moscow, and the core of the postamats (web application servers and base) is located in St. Petersburg. This happened historically, and over time this scheme began to cause some inconvenience, ”recalls Alexey Voronkov, director of operation and support for infrastructure. To transfer not only the architecture of postamats, but also office services, the company used VMware vCloud Connector .
Connection options vCloud Connector / Scheme from the site vmware.com
This tool is used to organize a hybrid cloud and automate the transfer of virtual machines between different data centers and clouds. With the help of backups and manual recovery, mostly large virtual machines with disks of 1 TB were transferred. All other operations were carried out in automatic mode.
Thanks to cloud technology, the move took quite a bit of time. “The company from a startup has become the market leader in automated points of issue. And five years of successful use of cloud technologies have shown that the once risky decision made to transfer the entire infrastructure to the IaaS cloud was correct, ”says Alexey.
According to a computer security community survey , 90% of organizations are concerned about cloud security. It is possible that this concern is not groundless. Small and medium businesses are increasingly subjected to DDoS attacks, and their scale has recently increased tenfold. However, the situation with DDoS protection in Russia is not bad and continues to change for the better. In one of our materials we talked about the DPI technology and the SCAT system, other possibilities and ways to protect against various attacks.
“The migration of critical systems beyond the company's internal infrastructure is associated with a high level of trust. In such a situation, the client must be sure of the reliability of the selected supplier and that the processing of confidential information occurs in a secure manner, and threats to security breaches are minimized, ” says Dmitry Tretyakov, IT Security Manager, IT-GRAD. For this reason, the IT-GRAD group of companies has been tested for compliance with the requirements of the PCI DSS v.3.1 standard. Such a cloud ensures safe handling, processing and transfer of payment card data, reducing the risk of financial loss from all sorts of hazards.
Many hosting providers complement the package of services and insurance opportunities. The cloud provider calls the insurance organization to conduct an assessment of the existing risks so that when the insured event occurs, compensation is paid to recover and re-collect information after it leaks, to cover expenses resulting from public disclosure of information, to cover court protection costs in case of violation agreements on the storage of personal data and so on.
The idea of such insurance in Russia originated several years ago and today there are companies on the market that offer such services. The well-known example is AIG. Thanks to this approach, customers of cloud services that have entered into a contract with an insurance company are always protected from unforeseen situations.
In 2015, a study was conducted in which over 250,000 members of the information security community on LinkedIn took part. The vast majority (71% of respondents) either plan to adapt cloud technologies for work, or are already actively using them.
/ Photo by Leonardo Rizzi CC')
If you have ever had to deal with the formation of the IT budget, then you know that sometimes it is very difficult to explain to management why it is necessary to allocate just such a sum for the purchase of new equipment or an upgrade of the old one. The user base is increasing, “hardware” is becoming obsolete - all this translates into considerable expenses. Such a scheme is difficult to scale and predict the load, especially if the company only enters the market.
In the case of a cloud system, scaling does not cause any difficulties. If the load was calculated incorrectly, then you can easily increase or decrease the number of processors and the amount of allocated memory. In other words, cloud technologies allow you to pay only for the resources that you actually use. When the whole system is in the cloud, the concept of a physical server disappears. This allows you to move services from one server to another without causing disruptions.
Cloud technologies for Russian business
There is an opinion that only technology companies can start using cloud systems. However, this is not the case. For example, not so long ago, the largest supplier of sports nutrition in Russia, the company FitnessBar (FitnessBar.ru), moved to the cloud. Initially, the project was conceived as an online store, but the great demand for goods “stimulated” the development of the service and pushed for the opening of the retail network (and the transition to cloud technology).
A terminal server was used to provide access to the single 1C FitnessBar database, however, the equipment could not cope with the sharply increased number of users. The management of the company decided to transfer the infrastructure to the cloud. As a server operating system, FitnessBar used Windows Server 2008R2 and the 1C file version of the database. After some time, the transition was made to the tandem of MS Windows Server + MS SQL, which was later replaced by Debian GNU / Linux and PostgreSQL. The latter option is not demanding of resources and will allow for a long time to increase the user base without degrading performance.
As a virtualization platform, the company uses VMware vCloud in the IT-GRAD cloud. The cloud structure of “IT-GRAD” is based on VMware solutions that provide the “three nines” availability level. Moreover, the cloud is distributed among the most reliable data centers in Russia, among which we can highlight the DataSpace, which has the Tier III reliability level according to the classification developed by the Uptime Institute. Tier III allows multi-user data centers to conduct scheduled repairs and equipment replacement without stopping services, which has a positive effect on user experience.
Another important component of the work of the remote FitnessBar unit is e-mail. E-mail clients have been configured to work over IMAP with the Alt-N MDaemon Messaging Server - this is a full-featured, reliable and secure messaging solution. In general, as Anton Shushunov, System Administrator of FitnessBar, says, the transition to the cloud fully justified itself: “The overall impressions of the work are positive. The allocation of resources is quite transparent, and we have enough performance. "
Another company that moved to the cloud is the Delivery Club food delivery service. Yevgeny Salnikov, CIO of the Delivery Club, says that the transition was due to the need to dynamically adjust resources for the load. The choice of the company fell on the IT-GRAD IaaS-cloud in connection with the entry into force of the law on the storage of personal data and the need to choose a hosting provider in the Russian Federation. “IT-GRAD” is one of the few cloud providers of such a level that has all the necessary licenses for our cloud option, ” notes Eugene.
It is also worth mentioning the company PickPoint, which organized the first network of postamats in Russia. The service has been living in the cloud for five years. A postamat is a parcel terminal for receiving goods ordered via the Internet, acting as an alternative to the postal service.
Postamat PickPoint
The basis of the post office is a PC running Windows Embedded with a router and a controller responsible for opening the cell door. Each postamat is connected to the application server via VPN. According to the company, in order to eliminate system hangs (related to the fact that processing requests, checking orders and fees is performed online), it was decided to organize a second application server with IIS.
At some point, PickPoint needed to transfer the infrastructure to the Moscow data center. “The fact is that the office of the company is located in Moscow, and the core of the postamats (web application servers and base) is located in St. Petersburg. This happened historically, and over time this scheme began to cause some inconvenience, ”recalls Alexey Voronkov, director of operation and support for infrastructure. To transfer not only the architecture of postamats, but also office services, the company used VMware vCloud Connector .
Connection options vCloud Connector / Scheme from the site vmware.com
This tool is used to organize a hybrid cloud and automate the transfer of virtual machines between different data centers and clouds. With the help of backups and manual recovery, mostly large virtual machines with disks of 1 TB were transferred. All other operations were carried out in automatic mode.
Thanks to cloud technology, the move took quite a bit of time. “The company from a startup has become the market leader in automated points of issue. And five years of successful use of cloud technologies have shown that the once risky decision made to transfer the entire infrastructure to the IaaS cloud was correct, ”says Alexey.
Cloud security
According to a computer security community survey , 90% of organizations are concerned about cloud security. It is possible that this concern is not groundless. Small and medium businesses are increasingly subjected to DDoS attacks, and their scale has recently increased tenfold. However, the situation with DDoS protection in Russia is not bad and continues to change for the better. In one of our materials we talked about the DPI technology and the SCAT system, other possibilities and ways to protect against various attacks.
“The migration of critical systems beyond the company's internal infrastructure is associated with a high level of trust. In such a situation, the client must be sure of the reliability of the selected supplier and that the processing of confidential information occurs in a secure manner, and threats to security breaches are minimized, ” says Dmitry Tretyakov, IT Security Manager, IT-GRAD. For this reason, the IT-GRAD group of companies has been tested for compliance with the requirements of the PCI DSS v.3.1 standard. Such a cloud ensures safe handling, processing and transfer of payment card data, reducing the risk of financial loss from all sorts of hazards.
Many hosting providers complement the package of services and insurance opportunities. The cloud provider calls the insurance organization to conduct an assessment of the existing risks so that when the insured event occurs, compensation is paid to recover and re-collect information after it leaks, to cover expenses resulting from public disclosure of information, to cover court protection costs in case of violation agreements on the storage of personal data and so on.
The idea of such insurance in Russia originated several years ago and today there are companies on the market that offer such services. The well-known example is AIG. Thanks to this approach, customers of cloud services that have entered into a contract with an insurance company are always protected from unforeseen situations.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/276145/
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