The popularity of cloud computing has transformed how companies do business. This transformation is inevitable. Industries around the world are deploying the latest technological innovations to help their businesses succeed. Since these solutions provide more flexibility and better data management options, companies are now realizing the significance of cloud computing for enterprise software development. According to Cisco, cloud data centers now process almost 94% of all workloads.
Top tech trends such as AI and IoT will continue to rise, but the most significant prediction will define how businesses overcome challenges in cloud computing. The future of cloud computing seems bright and possible — even industry experts believe that cloud computing is the "next big thing" that is at the forefront of all trending technologies. Total spending on the cloud will increase by 16% CAGR by 2026, which proves that cloud architecture is here to stay and will continue to facilitate businesses in achieving major goals.
Cloud computing is the distribution of various services via the Internet. These services may include applications and tools such as web servers, data storage, database, email services, and other internet applications. Rather than storing documents on a local computer or external storage device, cloud-hosted storage allows you to store them on a remote server. There are several advantages of using cloud computing.
There are two main types of cloud services: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and application-as-a-service (SaaS). IaaS is dedicated software that runs on virtual machines; it includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and a collection of servers that host the software. AAAS is a collection of hosted services that can be accessed over the internet. For instance, some cloud computing companies offer data storage and document management as part of a monthly service plan.
Do you ever have those moments where you know you’re thinking faster than the app you’re using? You click something and have time to think “what’s taking so long?” It’s frustrating, to say the least, but it’s an all-too-common problem in modern applications. A driving factor of this delay is latency, caused by offloading processing from the app to an external server. More often than not, that external server is a monolithic database residing in a single cloud region. This article will dig into some of the existing architectures that cause this issue and provide solutions on how to resolve them.
Latency Defined
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s define “latency.” In a general sense, latency measures the duration between an action and a response. In user-facing applications, that can be narrowed down to the delay between when a user makes a request and when the application responds to a request. As a user, I don’t really care what is causing the delay resulting in a poor user experience; I just want it to go away. In a typical cloud application architecture, latency is caused by the internet and the time it takes to make requests back and forth from the user’s device and the cloud, referred to as internet latency. There is also processing time to consider; the time it takes to actually execute the request, which is referred to as operational latency. This article will focus on internet latency with a hint of operational latency. If you’re interested in other types of latency, TechTarget has a good deep dive into specifics of the term.
Serverless applications that are well designed are separated, stateless, and utilize minimal code. With the growth of projects, the only aim of development managers is to preserve the design’s clarity and simplicity along with low code implementation. This blog post recommends the serverless architecture best practices with AWS Lambda.
Arranging Your Code Repositories
Most of the Serverless applications are Monolithic applications in the initial stage. This takes place either due to the growth of complexity with time or because the developers follow the subsisting development practices.
The digitalization drive has become the dominating trend, with computer technologies penetrating all spheres of social and personal life in the modern world. Alongside ushering innumerable benefits, the ubiquitous advent of IT devices has brought serious concerns in its wake. One of the most pressing questions that worries both individuals and organizations is, “How secure is my virtual data?”
Public anxiety is continuously fed by reports of security breaches and data leakages that cost companies a pretty penny. Their financial losses manifest an ever-growing pattern, with businesses having to spend (or waste?) millions of dollars to redress gruesome consequences. For example, Desjardines Group lost over $50 million to cover for the data leakage of their clientele, and Norsk Hydro had to fork out $75 million to eliminate the effects of a cyberattack. Such exorbitant losses are rare, but IBM experts believe that on average, corporate victims of cybercrime have to foot a bill equal to $4 million. Because of such appalling statistics, establishing cybersecurity of their IT environment is prioritized by many organizations. Even the malicious onslaught of the global pandemic didn’t relegate security considerations to a secondary place, with companies reluctant to cut down on the security strategy enforcement expenditures.
The term fog computing (or fogging) was coined by Cisco in 2014, so it is new for the general public. Fog and cloud computing are interconnected. In nature, fog is closer to the earth than clouds; in the technological world, it is just the same, fog is closer to end-users, bringing cloud capabilities down to the ground.
The main difference between fog computing and cloud computing is that the cloud is a centralized system, while the fog is a distributed decentralized infrastructure.
Today, businesses of every shape and size are reliant on the Internet — even the smallest ones have at least a website for representation and advertising, while some are run entirely online. However, maintaining a company’s own servers is a costly and tedious procedure, which creates the need in cloud computing services.
Cloud computing stands for the delivery of computing services on demand (storage and processing power) over the Internet.
In the year 2020, cloud adoption accelerated within enterprises, as they were forced to find ways to innovate and respond to the challenges associated with COVID-19. The pandemic seemingly validated the value proposition offered up by the cloud, with adoption allowing organizations to enhance their support for remote working setups, optimize IT costs, and ensure that their operational infrastructure is more resilient than ever.
In this episode of cocktails, Technology Sales Leader and Cloud Social Influencer Ian Moyse discusses with David Brown the barriers organizations face with cloud adoption, the impact of emerging technologies such as 5G and edge computing on the cloud, and the increasing security challenges, risks, and opportunities involved in cloud adoption.
As cloud computing rapidly proliferates enterprise IT and organizations migrate more of their traditional workloads and on-premise data in the cloud, the cloud will remain one of the fastest-growing segments of IT spend.
According to Gartner, by 2024, more than 45% of IT spending on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software, and business process outsourcing will move from traditional IT infrastructures to the cloud.
Enterprises are struggling to scale their infrastructure to the insatiable demands. They are adding up costs to hardware procurements, issue software updates, secure infrastructure, train staff, etc. On top of that, the ongoing pandemic is holding available human resources, limiting data center facilities, and shrinking hardware supply chains. Cloud computing brings much-needed relief.
No doubt, Flexera State of the Cloud report indicates 61 percent of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration this year. However, against what marketing pages of AWS and Microsoft Azure make you believe, cloud migration is more than moving VMs and databases in the cloud. You have to understand app dependencies, access technical feasibility, select the best instances, just to name a few. And then there are post migrations woes.
These challenges translate to added cost and not all of them are conspicuous until very later. To estimate the real cost of cloud migration for your business, you need to take a thoughtful, disciplined approach. The first step is to evaluate your current infrastructure.
The Real Cost of Current Infrastructure
If you don’t know how much your organization is paying for all those servers, software licenses, maintenance contracts, extended warranties, networking equipment, security contracts, then a visit to the accounting department will ease your day.
Also, you can gather data on network bandwidth, storage, and database capacity, etc. In a typical SME setup with a five-year hardware upgrade cycle, the first-year cost can be $40000-$50000 considering these variables:
In addition to the first year's costs, there are recurring costs. You may not buy new servers every year but must maintain them. The same goes for all the pieces of hardware and software running your IT infrastructure and resources managing it. Your recurring cost should be anywhere between 10-20% of your first-year cost.
However, the real cost of your current IT implementation is more than direct, operating, and administrative costs. Did you know you lose money every time there is downtime? When a power system in British Airway’s data center failed, the airline lost roughly $68 million in fare refund alone, not to mention a 2.8% dip in their stock prices. If your on-premise setup has a 98% uptime, then you’re giving up 14 hours of productivity hours every month. Most cloud vendors guarantee a 99.9% availability and compensate for any additional downtime based on your contract. According to a Forbes report, for an hour of downtime, you could be losing thousands of dollars. However, for most SMBs, you could be losing anywhere from $3000 to $5000 per month in downtimes.
So the cost of total ownership of your on-premise setup for three years is approx. $75000 to $85000.
The Real Cloud Infrastructure Cost
So the long story short: once upon a time, it was next to impossible to estimate cloud infrastructure cost up until the actual migration. There was little competition and cloud computing was all about AWS and little of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure here and there. Now we have every major tech firm in the cloud business and the competition is at an all-time high.
The pricing of major cloud vendors is still a little too complicated, but they now provide an approachable price estimation tool. Every major cloud vendor, along with AWS, offers some form of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator, including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Mostly, it is a simple tool that asks you a few basic hardware questions like your required bandwidth, RAM, processor core, storage, etc. If the tool feels a little arbitrary, then there is an advanced tool too that asks enough questions to cover your entire infrastructure, but the estimations are more accurate.
So I ran estimations on TCO tool for AWS, GCE and Azure respectively for a typical SME setup consisting 32 vCPUs and 128 GB RAM.
COVID-19 cases are increasing at an astonishing rate around the globe. 96.2 million cases have occurred globally, out of which 2.06 million people have died. This immense rate of patient’s data production has paved the way for new innovative data storage technologies. This data is utilized afterward to predict and analyze pandemic measures to fight post-pandemic virus conditions.
According to a study, ISARIC4C is collecting data of patients who are suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic from over 250 hospitals in the United Kingdom. Big data is an innovative technology that can be utilized by health care centers to store an enormous amount of patient information. This helps in developing a better understanding of the nature of this virus, and this collected information can also be further utilized for future prevention methods. This technology helps in storing all sorts of data i.e. the infected, recovered, and the number of deceased people. Prediction models have been developed by researchers which need to be fed a lot of data. The 4C deterioration model is designed using ISARIC4C data to predict the risk of COVID-19.
There would be no wrong in saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a new playground for hackers. Sadly, Cisco estimates that 53% of small-to-medium businesses (SMB) suffered from data breaches globally. 36 billion records were exposed in 2020. But the question that arises is, will these cybersecurity threats continue to grow in the upcoming years?
By the year 2025, the cloud computing market is expected to grow $832.1 billion. Below are the top five cybersecurity threats that are evolving in the cloud computing market in 2021.
DevOps… CI/CD… Docker… Kubernetes… I'm sure you've been bombarded with these words a lot the past year. Seems like the entire world is talking about it. The rate at which this segment is progressing, it won't be long before we reach the stage of NoOps.
Don’t worry. It’s okay to feel lost in the giant sea of tools and practices. It's about time we break down what DevOps really is.
Cloud computing has come a long, long way from the early days of mainframe timesharing technology and virtualization. Over the past decade alone, we’ve seen cloud computing experience tremendous growth, providing ubiquitous solutions for both consumers and enterprises. This trend is expected to continue with the rise of cloud-based services for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and edge computing.
However, the transformation to cloud computing remains a very challenging prospect for many enterprises. Enterprises need to consider factors such as cost, security, legacy and on-premise technologies, and the value of using cloud-native vs cloud-agnostic services.
Nowadays, most medical providers across the globe tend to implement cloud-based architecture for their medical services. And it’s not surprising, especially considering today's pandemic reality; medical software is a must. However, to build a highly secure solution to deliver medical services, you must abide by the US 1996 law, namely the HIPAA Security Rule. This legislation represents a set of required and adequate protections for managing electronic confidential patient information and avoiding its disclosure without prior patient's knowledge and even consent.
So, if you want to develop a medical solution and make your healthcare services cloud-based, you will have to apply the latest technologies for maintaining data compliance. To build cloud-based apps according to the Privacy Rule, most healthcare providers apply Amazon Web Services (AWS) due to its increased agility, security, and innovation potential.
In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about the basics of AWS Lambda error handling and some popular methods using StepFunctions and X-Ray. Regardless if you’re an AWS Lambda expert or if you’re a new Lambda user, there’s always something new to learn. You’ve probably already encountered Lambda errors that may seem pretty challenging since the mechanism that runs Lambda retries will often make it incredibly difficult to follow up on changes that occur within your serverless application.
Serverless is not all about straightforward execution of code on Lambda function, but it’s a different type of architecture of your entire system. Distributed nodes within this architecture that are activated thanks to asynchronous events are what makes this system.
We are well past the experimental stage with the cloud. It’s become mission-critical, and we have entered a stage where our applications and services need to take advantage of the globally distributed nature of the cloud and deliver on the expectations of our consumers.
Legacy relational databases are simply not built for the cloud. They are difficult to scale in this environment and costly to maintain their uptime. NoSQL stores were built to address legacy limitations; however, they fall short when it comes to providing consistent transactions. They are casually consistent. Some of the most successful global organizations have purpose-built databases that achieve the reliability of the relational store with the benefits of scale and global coverage that comes with the cloud. These databases are a new breed called Distributed SQL.
“Cloud computing offers individuals’ access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for
