Cloud Adoption

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services including Servers, Database, Storage, Networking & others over the internet. Public, Private & Hybrid clouds are different ways of deploying cloud computing.

• In public cloud, the cloud resources are owned by 3^rd party cloud service provider
• A private cloud consists of computing resources exclusively by one business or organization
• Hybrid provides the best of both worlds, combines on-premises infrastructure, private cloud with public cloud

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, IBM, and others are providing cloud platform to users to host and experience practical business solution. The worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow 17% in 2020 to total $266.4 billion and $354.6 billion in 2022, up from $227.8 billion in 2019, per Gartner, Inc.

There are various types of Instances, workloads & options available as part of cloud ecosystem, i.e. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Multi-cloud, Serverless.

Challenges

When very large, large and medium enterprise decides to move their IT environment from on-premise to cloud, they try to move some/most of their on-premises into cloud and keep the rest under their control on-premise. There are various factors that impact the decision, to name a few,

1. ROI vs Cost of Cloud Instance, Operation cost
2. Architecture dependency of the application, i.e. whether it is monolithic or multi-tier or polyglot or hybrid cloud
3. Requirement and need for elasticity and scalability
4. Availability of right solution from the cloud provider
5. Security of some key data

After crossing all, once the IT environment is cloud-enabled, the challenge comes in ensuring the monitoring of the Cloud-enabled IT environment. Here are some of the business and IT challenges

1. How to ensure the various workloads & Instances are working as expected?

While the cloud provider may give high availability & up time depending on the tier we choose, it is important that our IT team monitors the environment, as in the case of IaaS and to some extent in PaaS as well.

2. How to ensure the Instances are optimally used in terms of compute and storage?

Cloud providers give most of the metrics around the Instances, though it may not provide all metrics that we may need to make decision in all scenarios.

The disadvantage with this model is, cost, latency & not straight forward, e.g. the LOG analytics which comes in Azure involves cost for every MB/GB of data that is stored and the latency in getting the right metrics at right time, if there is latency/delay, you may not get a right result

3. How to ensure the Application or the components of a single solution that are spread across on-premise and Cloud environment is working as expected?

Some cloud providers give tools for integrating the metrics from on-premise to cloud environment to have a shared view.

The disadvantage with this model is, it is not possible to bring in all sorts of data together to get the insights straight. That is, observability is always a question. The ownership of getting the observability lies with the IT team who handles the data.

4. How to ensure the Multi-Cloud + On-Premise environment is effectively monitored & utilized to ensure the best End-user experience?

Multi-Cloud environment – With rapid growing Microservices Architecture & Container based cloud enabled model, it is quite natural that the Enterprise may choose the best from different cloud providers like Azure, AWS, Google & others.

There is little support from cloud provider on this space. In fact, some cloud providers do not even support this scenario.

5. How to get a single panel of view for troubleshooting & root cause analysis?

Especially when problem occurs in Application, Database, Middle Tier, Network & 3^rd party layers that are spread across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, elastic environment, it is very important to get a Unified view of entire environment.

ZIF, provides a single platform for Cloud Monitoring.

ZIF has Discovery, Monitoring, Prediction & Remediate that seamlessly fits for a cloud enabled solution. ZIF provides the unified dashboard with insights across all layers of IT infrastructure that is distributed across On-premise host, Cloud Instance & Containers.