“Ride the IaaS Wave”: How and by whom is the virtual infrastructure used?
/ photo by Steven Tyler PJs CC
Cloud services are being deployed everywhere. Small and large businesses regularly take advantage of them: a variety of companies translate their infrastructure into the clouds.
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Some user cases are quite simple (for example, hosting a website or a web application), while others are quite complex (recall the story about the Netflix infrastructure ).
So how are cloud services used? We would like to talk about this. Perhaps this material will allow you to see the full range of IaaS capabilities and encourage the use of this tool for your business.
File storage, synchronization and resource sharing
Everyone has already heard about Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive - services for storing and synchronizing files. Some provide a limited amount of storage, others - unlimited. Many are focused on the mass consumer, but small, medium and large businesses use their corporate counterparts to help centralize the management of files and data.
Backup
The requirements of customers are constantly growing, and with it the market of backup systems itself is changing. If you had to deploy your own infrastructure before, now you have the opportunity to store your backup copies on a remote site. With this approach, a clear advantage emerges - no need to bother with your own infrastructure and spend money on maintaining IT backup specialists.
Cloud backup systems offer solutions to these problems with additional benefits. The IT professional only needs to install agents, select data to back up, and set up a task schedule. After this, the process takes place automatically, which seriously reduces the workload of staff members. Savings on hardware are generally obvious: you do not have to acquire, install and maintain expensive storage systems.
The cloud for data backup and recovery has been used by the Hotels.ru hotel reservation service, having been an IT-GRAD client since 2010. Backups are done several times a day, and the backup site is present as a company agreement with another data center.
During the six years of operation of the Hotels.ru service, a real large-scale accident did not happen, but under testing, the scheme proved to be quite reliable. During the "rehearsal" the whole process took less than 16 hours.
Web hosting
This is one of the most common cloud scenarios in business. A company may host web pages on physical machines, but this may cause problems when introducing new services and functions. If a company works in the cloud, then it will not have difficulty scaling.
Disaster tolerance
Recently, this yuzkeys, gaining great popularity. Speaking of systems of this class, usually means a backup data center, which can be used to transfer the load from an already inoperative place.
Often, Disaster Recovery Solution is confused with a conventional high availability system. Both approaches ensure the operation of the application in case of problems with the equipment or software, but differ in the permissible scale of the accident. For example, an excellent 16-node HA-cluster will not save the room from flooding. DRS systems can “survive” in case of large-scale failure of several data centers at once, without paralyzing the application for an indefinite period of time.
By the way, not so long ago we published a post on how to prepare a disaster-proof solution.
Entering the international market
With physical infrastructure, you usually choose the location that is best suited to serve your customers. But the concept of going global implies that your audience will become international. Not every company can afford to open data centers in different countries.
However, many cloud providers have data centers around the world. This means that you can place your capacities in several places in order to more efficiently distribute content, services and products.
The advantages of cloud technologies are appreciated by the company Franmer, engaged in the production of composite pools. Over the ten years of the company's existence, the coverage area has increased - today, dealer points are present in 69 cities of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kazakhstan. The rapid growth, expansion of the services offered and the range of products increased the number of customers and, as a result, required a review of the existing IT infrastructure.
There was a need to change the principles of its construction, the organization of a centralized approach with guaranteed reliability, mobility, high availability and adequate cost. Franmer revised priorities and decided to abandon the physical infrastructure in favor of the cloud. The company has been a loyal customer of IT-GRAD for more than 7 years.
Testing and development
Another feature of the cloud is not only the ability to work in real time, but also how quickly you can build and test infrastructure. Want to see how your application works under high load? Make a copy of it and do a stress test. Want to compare system performance on Ubuntu and Windows? Please, this will take minutes.
Moreover, transferring test environments to the cloud reduces costs to the secondary infrastructure by 20–30% (you may be interested in reading our material on how to calculate the benefits of migration to the cloud).
Ideas check
Do you have an idea you want to try out? Perhaps your young startup wants to show future investors that the project is worthy of their investments. In this case, it is very simple to realize your thought in the cloud and then decide whether it will bring the expected result. If you follow the rule “do it, and customers will come,” then the cloud is what you need.
Now the quality bar for a popular web service is extremely high. If earlier the issue was solved simply by a beautiful design, then now the user is familiar with good and bad interfaces that are comfortable and not very menu, etc. Taking into account the high competition in the market, the familiar company.ru is trying to meet the requirements of the times.
Prototypes of future versions and running in of new functions often require separate stands of similar performance. “We shudder to remember self-assembly“ servers ”and nightly engraftment.
Progress here, of course, is relaxing: clicked the mouse and got the whole farm to be tested, - says a company representative. “At the same time, there is no need to go to the management for a budget for test iron, and later - to think about where to put the obsolete decommissioned equipment. Beauty".
Seasonal load
As noted above, scalability is one of the main advantages of the cloud. If you need additional power to meet the needs of end users, you add resources. When they become redundant, discard them. Thus, in the infrastructure, none of the elements “is idle”, which otherwise could lead to additional costs.
For this very reason, the Delivery Club company uses the power of the IT-GRAD IaaS provider. Delivery Club today is the absolute leader in the Russian market for food delivery, which is part of the international company Foodpanda. The service is represented in 79 cities of Russia and cooperates with more than 4 thousand restaurants.
The project is constantly faced with increasing load, because the company's IT department needs to respond very quickly to changes.
“We cannot afford to constantly change the iron. We have to dynamically adjust resources for the load, - Yevgeny Salnikov, IT Director for the Delivery Club. - Cloud technologies are our everything, besides, we pay only for the resources that are actually used. We dynamically manage the entire pool of allocated resources, and this is very profitable, because, I repeat, we only pay for what we use. It is reliable, fast and convenient. ”
Business Intelligence and Big Data
The amount of information stored on the Internet doubles approximately every one and a half year. According to IDC estimates, in 2012, the total content of the world wide web was 2500 exabytes. This data is a valuable source of information for analytical companies. Big data allows you to learn more about current trends and potential customers.
New tools provide an opportunity to get a rough idea of the data content, see some patterns, and thereby assess the usefulness of the data and the need for further work with them. For example, an automaker can, based on customer reviews, identify certain patterns and hidden defects.
Cloud business intelligence is growing rapidly. Powerful computing systems in the data center of the provider cope with complex analytical tasks. Clouds allow you to get IT resources and not engage in the life cycle of servers and software updates.
If in 2012 companies tried to understand and realize what kind of technologies they are, they give, then since 2013, interest has shifted to implementation examples, and since 2014, practical use of big data technologies has begun. Today they appear (at least at the level of pilot projects) with large Russian telecommunication companies, banks and trade organizations.
Financial Services / E-Commerce
More and more organizations and consumers are using online services to work with financial data. In the key of e-commerce, you should pay attention to whether the vendor has a PCI DSS certificate. It defines the requirements for organizations related to the security of payment card data. We talked about the benefits of certification here .
The network selling sports nutrition and accessories FitnessBar.ru is an active user of our IaaS cloud. Initially, the company existed in the popular format of an online store with one warehouse, but with the growth of the business, the idea of launching a retail network arose.
The company was originally formed as an online store, but the demand for sportpit quickly pushed the owners to develop the project and build a chain of stores. For one office and warehouse, a traditional Windows-based information system was used with all the usual Russian business tools like 1C.
However, the emergence of new retail outlets somewhat complicated the task, since it was necessary to provide joint access to a single 1C “Trade Management” database for office and remote divisions of the company.
The task was solved using terminal servers. Users from different places connect to a common terminal server, which already has direct access to the databases. According to Anton Shushunov, system administrator for FitnessBar, the bet on cloud systems has fully justified itself.
Work with providers
An enterprise resource management system (ERP) was designed to automate operations within a company. Unfortunately, organizations entering the world market need to interact with thousands of suppliers around the globe, using business processes that are not supported by their internal systems. To solve this problem, several cloud providers offer ERP services and are gaining popularity in the supply chain.
"DMI Dyatkovo" - a well-known brand in the market of furniture products. The concern specializes in the production of interior solutions for home decoration and has its own production facilities and dealer network, which has more than 400 salons in Russia and abroad.
Today, the company's sales management system is located in the IT-GRAD cloud. The solution is used for registering vendors, generating orders, and placing orders, allowing sales of a particular dealer through the cloud service. As noted above, guaranteed reliability and constant availability of service are paramount tasks that can be easily solved using cloud technology in the IaaS model.
Conclusion
Every year server virtualization and cloud technologies penetrate our lives more and more. In 2016, companies around the world will spend $ 204 billion on public cloud services, which is 16.5% more than in 2015.
“Every year more and more companies whose main business is trading are choosing the cloud-based IaaS platform as the main platform for hosting their information systems,” says Alexander Starodubtsev, deputy general director of the IT-GRAD group of companies. - Of course, not every project of IaaS or SaaS is certainly the most profitable solution. As part of any IT project, you should at least consider the option of implementing it in the cloud, and the choice should be made based on a weighted feasibility study. ”
Cloud technologies should not be considered a panacea, but you should not underestimate them either. From a technical point of view, cloud services today are suitable for solving problems of any complexity, and corporate IaaS is not inferior in functionality to private infrastructure solutions of companies.
Our materials on the topic:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/304654/
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