Projects "moved" to the cloud: IT-GRAD's company experience
To start providing cloud services, it is not necessary to invest huge sums in equipment in order to create a complex and expensive IT infrastructure on its basis, which in the future will also have to be serviced. A much more profitable solution would be to rent a virtual data center from a reliable IaaS provider in order to focus all efforts on software development, that is, to pay all your attention to your business.
Cloud technologies are increasingly penetrating into various areas of activity, and, as practice shows, they simplify the solution of many tasks, while at the same time reducing costs. Since clouds are a technical solution, it is not surprising that IT companies are the first to get to know them.
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One of them was the company "First BIT", which is the creator of the project "LIVE" - a cloud service hosting database 1C. “We wanted to do exactly cloud projects - because we believed in the convenience and benefits of a new business idea,” explains Victor Kanaev, head of the cloud computing department at First BIT. “On the one hand, there are no large initial expenses, on the other hand, professionals are responsible for the server part.”
The “First BIT” decided to move towards creating a cloud-based direction based on the 1C product, since this software (as well as all its advantages) is widely known in Russia. “The choice fell on IaaS. - says Victor. “The prospect of leasing capacity looked the most sensible when you consider that the company's main business is software development.”
All projects of the company are based on standard blocks. Each block consists of a Windows server with a 1C database and a client part. In addition to the 1C infrastructure itself, Active Directory, Linux-based routing and other network functions, a Windows terminal farm, and monitoring systems act as supporting services. Terminal Services (RDP) is used to connect clients.
In general, the ultimate goal of the company, according to Victor, is to make the service of remote access to 1C databases as simple as working with e-mail, for example, Gmail - cloud technologies allow this.
But another example of a company that has switched to the cloud is the Speech Technology Center. MDG is a developer of innovative systems in the field of high-quality recording, processing and analysis of audio and video information. For example, one of their cloud products, VoiceFabric, is designed for speech synthesis. The scope of its applicability is wide enough: recording audio podcasts, sounding books, videos or articles on websites.
The service offers two ways to sound: using the built-in web service directly on the site or using the built-in API, which is integrated via HTTP. Information is exchanged between the VoiceFabric API service and the user's application / device over HTTPS.
The MDGs team says that cloud technologies help to keep up with the times, which give more flexibility and broaden the horizons of the services provided.
But not only technology companies understand how useful clouds are. Just look at the American company The Weather Channel, which provides information about the weather anywhere in the world. When elements are approaching, employees have no time to think about disk space and traffic volume, which increases 20 times when a storm occurs.
Some statistics. As a rule, about 12 million unique users come to the company's website per month. However, if the forecast means a storm, then the same number of people can visit the resource in one day (sometimes attendance jumps to 30 million users per hour).
To cope with such load differentials, flexible scaling capabilities are required. “Moving all tasks to the cloud has allowed The Weather Channel employees to focus on using the applications and services needed by the business,” said Landon Williams, vice president of infrastructure and services.
Williams also noted that about four years ago it was about 10% more profitable for the company to maintain its own data center. But as time went on, and cloud providers began to offer more profitable and cheaper solutions, so it became economically inefficient to service their own data center.
The company decided to store all vital services at the sites of several IaaS providers - this approach was used to provide additional insurance. 70% of the resources were located on the side of one IaaS supplier, 10% on the side of another, and the remaining 20% ​​- in the company's own data centers. However, some applications and services work only on one supplier’s site, and the most critical ones, for example, SUN (Storage Utility Network), are running in both clouds at once.
As it turned out, cloud technologies were very helpful. When Hurricane Sandy hit the US in October 2012, the company had already begun the transition, so it was able to cope with a huge flow of traffic. “We would deal with Sandy,” notes Williams. “But for this, it would be necessary to“ weaken ”the site in terms of collecting detailed statistics, limit content and disable additional features.”
The automotive industry is also aiming to get a little closer to the clouds. The following story will go about one of the largest networks of car dealerships in Russia, which wished to remain unrecognized. The company is engaged in the sale and maintenance of cars, and also provides a range of related services.
Its transition to cloud technologies was associated with the emergence of the need for additional computing power and services. Initially, the management of the company decided to purchase new equipment in order to deploy a private cloud on it using VMware virtualization technologies.
However, hardware tends to become obsolete, and expensive purchased equipment may become irrelevant in just a few years. That is exactly what happened to the hero of this story. After this incident, the managers decided to rent a rack from a reliable supplier, which turned out to be much more profitable than maintaining a fleet of servers on their own.
Moving to the cloud was simplified by the fact that the company already had a developed virtual infrastructure — it was necessary to simply transfer all data from a private cloud to a public one. The specifics of the company are such that the main cloud capacities are consumed by the terminal farm - all employees use a thin client, with the exception of department heads who work with personal laptops.
Due to the peculiarity of the workflow, all requests from clients come in the form of HTTP or HTTPS requests, which makes it possible to get by with ordinary browsers and not install specialized software.
Since the company needed to use a file server, and a standard Windows solution was not allocated for this purpose, NetApp was used as a file repository. By creating DFS links from a domain controller to NetApp, company users were given the Public share, and after setting up the snapshot creation functionality, they [users] were able to restore accidentally deleted copies of files on their own.
The case when the car company needed to bring services necessary for business into the cloud is not the first. Another example is the well-known company Tata Motors. Its employees use specialized portals hosted in the cloud. With the help of these portals, fleet owners can track all vehicles in real time.
According to reports by Tata Motors, the use of web services in the cloud has a positive effect on the work of the company as a whole. Cloud solutions help in a short time to implement new infrastructure projects, starting with the planning stage and ending with their implementation.
“The transition of Tata Motors to the cloud increased the speed of the services necessary for the business, including the availability of web hosting, the ability to use cloud storages and a video library, publish catalogs and much more,” said Tata Motors IT solutions manager Madhusudan (Madhusudan). Shekar). “All this taken together required and requires the presence of a large, complex infrastructure, which is quite simply solved by moving to the cloud.”
PS Materials on the topic from our blog on Habré:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/277973/
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