Moving to the cloud: A possibility not only for IT companies
Last week, we talked about technology companies that decided to trust cloud providers. Today is the second part, in which we will talk about non-technological projects and their relationship with the “cloud”.
Nowadays, retail as an industry is becoming one of the main consumers of cloud solutions in the IaaS model. Moreover, this is true not only for small stores, but even for entire retail chains. Thanks to the existing virtualization capabilities, even a large seller can afford to translate absolutely any services into the cloud environment.
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An example of this is the fully virtualized infrastructure of one of the largest children's toy stores in Russia, Hamleys World, located in the IT-GRAD cloud. It includes all the tools you need to do business. Let's look at them in more detail.
A virtualized domain infrastructure is deployed for the company's central office, and using domain authentication, users are able to access the necessary applications.
As for the mail service, it is Microsoft Exchange, which serves as the Client Access Server (CAS) and Transport Hub (HT) at the same time. Spam Titan Server acts as a border server that protects against malware and spam.
Also in the cloud infrastructure there are unified communications systems based on Cisco Unified Communications, which are presented in the form of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX) software. You can see Microsoft Forefront TMG in the image above - it protects the infrastructure of the organization and is used as a reverse proxy for accessing Microsoft Exchange.
For the connection of remote retail outlets of the network of stores, each of them has a Cisco ASA with a dedicated external IP address, and Juniper is on the side of “IT-GRAD”. All devices connect to the provider through the appropriate interfaces, and an IPSec tunnel is established between the remote points and traffic is allowed in both directions. As for VPN, it’s a Site-to-Site IPSec with a pre-shared-key set value.
Access to the Internet from each outlet is also organized via VPN. It turns out that all traffic passes through the Palo Alto firewall in the IT-GRADA cloud, and this makes it possible to monitor application traffic, monitor user actions and forwarded content.
As it turned out, many retailers decide to seek help from cloud technologies. Here is another example - the company FitnessBar, which sells sports nutrition.
Answering the question why the decision was made to move to the cloud, Anton Shushunov, a technical specialist of the company, said that one of the reasons was the simplicity of scaling: “In the case of the cloud system, there is no question of scaling at all - just add more processors and memory to a specific server . If you find an excess, it is enough to perform the reverse procedure, which will proportionally reduce the monthly bill for the service. ”
In their case, the migration occurred immediately and completely. Anton sharpened the infrastructure for the company's requirements, then MSI installers prepared in RemoteApp were distributed to workstations, and the database was archived and transferred to the cloud.
As a software platform, the company used Windows Server 2008R2 with 1C and SQL, but after some time the file version of the database stopped coping with the load, so the transition was made to the SQL version of the database (first to MS SQL, then to PostgreSQL). At the same time, the OS was also changed - switched to Debian GNU / Linux. Such a system turned out to be less demanding of resources, which made it possible to add new users with minimal impact on performance.
However, the retail industry is not limited to stores only. There are also restaurants, cafes and coffee houses, that is, places where people can have a snack. But where there is food, there must be a delivery service - this contributes to the frantic pace of life in the megalopolises. The following discussion focuses on the Delivery Club project, which has combined hundreds of food and food delivery services.
Today, most companies make a choice in the direction of cloud technologies, because they solve and optimize many tasks - the Delivery Club is no exception. Answering the question about why the transition was made to the cloud, the IT-director of the Delivery Club, Yevgeny Salnikov, says that this was caused by the growing load, and did not want to constantly change the hardware.
“The cloud is much more profitable and more convenient for us in terms of administration, support, and fault tolerance,” notes Eugene. - We only pay for the resources that are actually used. The more traffic, the more we pay. This allows us not to think about replacing or buying new servers. ”
The field of education is also not far behind. The University of Sao Paulo is the largest university in Brazil and the most prestigious public institution. The relentless commitment to research in all areas of science and the accelerated pace of new discoveries have helped USP become one of the leading research universities in the world.
However, the USP faced an unpleasant problem that had been brewing for a long time. At the disposal of the university was a scattered IT environment in the form of 150 data centers. To retain the title of innovation institution, the university needed to implement a flexible infrastructure.
“High demands are often placed on storage systems and processor capacities. We store huge amounts of climate and genomic data that require adequate resources and high-performance analysis systems, ” explains Antonio Roque Dechen, executive vice president of management and professor at the Agricultural College Luis de Queiroz at the University of São Paulo.
“New IT resources have always been expensive, and bureaucratic processes have lasted for years, which significantly slowed the launch of new projects. All this painfully affected the activities of scientists, because they had to wait until the purchase process was carried out, in order to start their work, ”adds Cyrano Rizzo, director of the data processing center at USP. “On average, depending on the requirements for the equipment and its maintenance, the cost of the project could be about $ 88,800, and after completing the study, we were left alone with expensive and rather specific equipment.”
Therefore, in 2012, the university management gave the green light to the implementation of the “Cloud USP” project - it was planned to make 6 of the 150 university data centers, and to gather corporate, research and educational environments into a massive private cloud built on the FlexPod.
FlexPod is a set of server and network equipment configurations, as well as data center software, offered by Cisco and NetApp. The goal is to provide ready-made, unified and proven equipment combinations that provide all the necessary tools for networking and cloud computing.
After the university has made the transition to the cloud, it only takes a few hours (sometimes minutes) to provide IT resources for research projects. The USP was able to conduct research at a great distance from the object being studied, and students - the opportunity to study online. More than 150,000 people gained access to lectures, mail, a digital library, as well as museum collections.
“The cloud allows researchers to achieve results much faster, which contributes to the rapid penetration of information technology at the university,” Roque said. “Cloud USP, in essence, accelerates research and development activities, providing safe and mobile access to particularly important educational tools, making research accessible from virtually anywhere in the world.”
PS Materials on the topic from our blog on Habré:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/277975/
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