Cloud Hosting

Joseph George

Joseph is a vice president of product management for digital service and operations management at BMC. In this role, he drives transformation powered by a modern, open AIOps, SaaS platform solving a range of customer needs across observability, service assurance, predictive optimization and automated remediation.

For todays organizations, modernization is imperative. Technology leaders know that to drive business value, they must evolve their infrastructure to be more efficient, flexible and cost-effective.

Modern technologies such as serverless computing and containerization on cloud platforms offer compelling means to meet these objectives but also an overwhelming array of potential paths. What to do is clear; how to do it is not.

IT needs to go beyond lifting and shifting to migrate and modernize with confidence.

This article will examine the top three challenges that IT teams face when migrating to new environments and, more importantly, how to solve them.

Cloud computing has established itself as the operating system of the future. Traditional concerns over safety and reliability have transformed into appreciation for the clouds ability to enable innovation, adapt with ease and, when done right, control costs. The explosion of cloud-computing services evolving beyond an infrastructure-on-demand option gives organizations countless ways to deliver modern applications. But with choice comes complexity. In addition, the combination of providers and services is daunting, from AWS to Azure, IBM to Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

This situation puts IT between the proverbial rock and hard place. If they choose one provider and go all in with a standard lift and shift, they lose the ability to optimize and fully leverage the platform services. Without optimization, its much harder to achieve the benefits that inspired the move to the cloud in the first place. However, analyzing all potential migration possibilities is time- and resource-prohibitive. Building a matrix of all the options would result in hundreds or thousands of permutations. Choosing the right mix becomes virtually impossible.

Both of these options make it difficult for IT to hit the sweet spot. You dont want to under-provision due to risk-performance issues, but over-provisioning wastes money. Not to mention, cloud services are constantly changing. Migration needs to evolve to factor in business demands and new service availability. Without the ability to visualize, predict and optimize for current and future workloads, IT cant capitalize on the full potential of the cloud.

Container environments like Kubernetes provide similar benefits and challenges as the cloud. Containers empower IT teams to increase efficiency, agility and speed, improving application life cycle management and making it faster and easier to modernize existing applications. Like the cloud, though, containers must be optimized to deliver on their ability to reduce costs and streamline performance.

To orchestrate containers effectively, IT must understand how to allocate them. As with cloud provisioning, under-allocating container resources can result in issues with service assurance, while over-allocation can lead to wasted spending, especially since individual application teams tend to request more resources than they need to be safe. Right-sizing container environments is particularly important when containers are used to manage the impact of fluctuating business demands on IT systems. Its crucial to optimize container environments for your current state, but its also important to know whats coming so resources can be allocated accordingly.

Containers and cloud arent the only systems that require IT teams to predict and plan for changing business demands. Modernizing your IT infrastructure requires clear visibility into how ups and downs in internal and external drivers can affect all of your systems; without it, you risk dramatic consequences to the businesss top and bottom lines.

The complexity of todays environments makes this correlation more challenging than ever. Even with the right people, expertise and resources, a capacity-planning team still could not keep pace with the speed and unpredictability of the current market and understanding its impact on the underlying technology infrastructure and resources. Factoring in known or planned events and potential business scenarios through what-if planning is critical to proactively assess and manage risk. This enables action to be taken ahead of time and prevents service outages or performance degradation.

Solving all three of these challenges requires the following capabilities:

IT leaders must ensure they have the technology resources necessary for service assurance today and tomorrow no matter how dynamic, complex or diverse their environment. Whether you are migrating from on premises to public cloud, from one cloud to another, or between clouds in a multicloud environment, predictive IT with AIOps, machine learning, advanced analytics and intelligent automation can provide the insights you need to balance risk, efficiency and IT spend while optimizing performance and availability.

Feature image via Pixabay.

Excerpt from:
Overcoming the Top 3 Challenges of Infrastructure Modernization The New Stack - thenewstack.io