Cloud Hosting

As important it is for businesses to embark on their cloud journeys today, it is equally important to plan and strategize it. Implementing cloud is one of the biggest changes that the company goes through and it could be a smooth process if strategized well.

In conversation with ETCIO, Vasanth Kamatgi, CTO, Ferns N Petals, shares the strategy behind the companys move to cloud computing.

We - FNP CET (Center of Excellence in Technology) were given the responsibility to forcefully impact the bottomline and growth of FNP. We decided to adopt four main goals towards this end - cost, resourcefulness, simplified and highly secure platform as the means of achieving that goal. One factor that precipitated this entire episode was the amount of time and energy being spent in administering the set of dedicated servers during various business peaks, Kamatgi said.

We had a strong belief (ne, myth) at that time that dedicated hosting was the best option to ensure performance. And the cost of administering the infrastructure, was a necessary evil. We went through various benchmark tests on cloud to understand how it may impact the speed of the system. Most critical parameter was - low latency during peak. Through the varied experiments that we conducted, with the help of our cloud provider, we could demonstrate ways of overcoming latency on cloud by creating a setup that is cost effective and scalable on demand utilizing capabilities of caching and CDN which was already part of our application architecture, he explained.

Kamatgi believes that the journey from proposal to realization was not an easy one. With every aspect of the companys e-commerce application setup certain to be impacted, it was both a challenge and learning experience.

The company concluded that it should go big bang in terms of setup, but release with circumspect. This approach allowed them to measure vitals and enabled them to react on failures, apply the fix - tune until convinced - with a deadline and scope in mind. While this strategy made the companys Infra (ops) team learn the dynamics, the team could create a successful internal training program to bring everyone to this new expedition.

We let people experiment on the cloud, as the cost of experimentation is significantly less (compared to non-cloud), and in certain cases sponsored by the provider. This resulted in budgets being available to ops engineers, which enabled them to learn fast and fail fast, he said.

Prima facie the cloud enabled us to replicate environments, viz., add compute, add storage, with the click of a button. This made the system breathe easy. This changed the thought process of solutioning. We kept introducing simplified solutions, experimented at speed of thought - and all this was achieved with lesser effort, he added.

One classic solution FnP applied was on the RDBMS architecture - separating Reads and Writes on the database. The company was able to isolate critical DB Writes and execute them on a fail-safe service instance. And DB Reads were distributed across replicated slave instances, which could be scaled up or down independently during load surges.

Spinning up servers on-demand, automating, fault tolerant configurations have been included as default. This allowed the team to sleep peacefully during a load surge. We could also create more cache layers by context ensuring they enhance speed and automated the processes of clearing stale data to be time critical on updates to all systems. In essence, cloud computing gave us many advantages in terms of cost savings, security, flexibility, mobility, quality control, sustainability and competitive edge, he said

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Strategy behind this retailers cloud migration journey - ETCIO.com