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Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of blog posts about Online Tech’s cloud locations and the teams that work behind the scenes. Welcome back on our data center world tour! In our last post, we were in Michigan learning about Online Tech’s four data centers and headquarters. Today, we travel to Austin, Texas! Aside from being known as the place for the SXSW music festival, Austin is also home to a burgeoning tech scene. Its central location within the US (four hour or less direct flight from nearly anywhere in the country) makes it ideal for data storage. Here are some other fun facts about our Austin location: The data center is located in the Met Center business park, which is ideally near both the city center and highway access. It boasts 45,000 square feet and is perfect for production and disaster recovery solutions. The facility is part of CyrusOne’s ultra-low latency National IX Internet fiber exchange, and offers the operational and uptime requirements needed to meet or exceed many of today’s compliance requirements including HIPAA, PCI, ISO 27001, FISMA, and TIA 942 Class 4. There is fully redundant 2N power and cooling onsite to ensure that any…
IT infrastructure, what we’ve all come to know and love (or hate, depending on your viewpoint) is the driving force behind all of our machines. What if it were to be so widely available that you didn’t even have to think about it when building a program? In a less dramatic sense, this is the definition behind invisible infrastructure. History Remember back in the day when personal computer commercials used to say “powered by a 6 core processor with a million gigs of RAM and other awesome technical specs”? That’s because in those days, it was important to the consumer that their hardware was powerful and capable. But in today’s world of software-defined everything, edge computing and cloud-native applications, it’s expected that infrastructure is available, reliable, secure and compliant. To put it simply, it just has to work. Invisible advances? In the last 10 years, there have been huge advances in the hardware and data center worlds, but the rise of cloud computing especially means the location of our data is not as important as it once was. Data centers are built literally all over the world, and the hardware that powers them is cheaper and more readily available than ever….
What is serverless computing? The idea is growing in popularity, but the term honestly sounds like an oxymoron. How does it work, and why should you consider it for your IT organization? Well, the name is a false promise–there are actually servers involved with serverless computing. They just aren’t managed by the organization. A serverless computing model means your cloud provider takes care of adding, removing, and/or adjusting your server resources based upon demand. You end up with a more accurate bill for your usage because it’s based literally on milliseconds, not hours. There are a couple of ideas behind this: One is to avoid prepaying for resources that might be unused, resulting in huge savings for your organization. The second is taking the burden of server management off of the developer’s hands, leaving them free to simply write code. Serverless now This sounds like something out of the future, but the truth is, the future is now. The big cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) all offer serverless computing services, but Amazon’s Lambda is perhaps the most well-known. According to their website, “Lambda runs your code on high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all the administration of the compute resources,…
In multiple studies, the top concerns for executives around the cloud are security, migration strategies (which apps are moving to the cloud and which aren’t), and cost management. In the public cloud such as Microsoft Azure, cost control is an especially desirable outcome. According to Cloudamize, a cloud analytics company, 34 percent of the instances they analyzed had cost saving opportunities greater than 30 percent, and 76 percent of the analyzed instances weren’t provisioned optimally for their workloads. It appears that most organizations aren’t optimizing cloud costs like they think–most likely because they’re bringing their on-prem deployment models and management strategies to the cloud table, where they don’t quite fit in. Unfortunately, cloud and on-premises models don’t work the same way. And there’s no place where you’ll see that more clearly than your bill. With the Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go model, depending on your environment and how you’re using it, you could be in for some big sticker shock. What are some ways to manage your Azure bill and keep it from getting out of control? Well, perhaps obviously, optimizing your spend is a giant step towards managing your bill. But it’s one thing to say you’ll fix your spend and another…
Cloud sprawl is a major issue for many IT organizations, and leads to many problems such as rising costs, security vulnerabilities and threats to data integrity. It’s become such a concern that optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative for 53 percent of organizations, according to RightScale’s 2017 state of the cloud report. But what is cloud sprawl, why did it come about and how can you keep it in check? What is cloud sprawl? In a nutshell, cloud sprawl is excess machines or workloads running, oftentimes without the company’s knowledge. Sprawl happens when an organization fails to properly monitor manage or control its cloud environment. This leads to headaches across the entire IT department because its effects are felt by everyone–from the IT admin who has to round up all the “wild” cloud instances in the environment, to the CIO who must own up to the high cost of running those extra unnecessary workloads. Why do we have to worry about cloud sprawl? As Nick Lumsden put it, sprawl exists because of a storage problem more than a compute problem. With the rise of Big Data, suddenly sprawl became an expensive storage and storage density problem, especially as workloads…
After introducing it in 2015, Microsoft recently announced its Azure Stack platform is ready for customer purchase. Why is there so much buzz around this platform, and what does it mean for the enterprise customer? There is a lot of interest around Azure Stack, and for good reason. Essentially, it offers the same functionality, performance and security that they offer in the public cloud, but with the added bonus of running it in your own data center. This gives you the privacy and data sovereignty you need. It’s a big deal for companies who want to take advantage of Azure’s powerful PaaS capabilities but are stopped by compliance and regulatory requirements, as well as complicated deployments where there may be little to no internet access. Azure Stack aims to address those regulatory concerns and streamline the deployment process by working directly with hardware providers to deliver integrated systems. Ease of deployment There are many kinds of cloud platforms available today, but they aren’t always easy to run. For example, open source cloud platform OpenStack is one of the biggest community projects in use, but it can be complicated to deploy and update, and Microsoft wanted to avoid that problem with Azure Stack. Therefore,…
“Multi-cloud” is a term that’s cropped up quite a bit in IT circles lately, with a lot of buzz generated about “multi-cloud strategies.” Is this another new term the IT industry needs to learn, or just another way of referring to hybrid cloud? Well, these terms may be used interchangeably by some, but they are not the same. To explain, we’ll first define what hybrid and multi-cloud are. Then we’ll explain the differences, which are subtle but very distinct, between the two. Let’s start with hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud: There are a few different definitions of hybrid cloud floating around, but for the purposes of this post, let’s say hybrid cloud is a mix of public and private cloud that connects the public cloud to your on-premise infrastructure and is orchestrated to run together for a single task. In this scenario, you’re optimizing your workload so it runs in the right environment at the right time. To do this, you might have more than one cloud infrastructure, but because you’re using a mixture of clouds to accomplish a single task, you are using a hybrid cloud. Multi-cloud: This is literally using multiple clouds, from multiple providers, for multiple tasks. Why use this strategy? Well, one…
As mentioned previously, server tagging in public cloud offers many benefits, including the ability to better track your cloud resources and get more meaningful KPI metrics for financial and usage reporting. How do you tag your servers though? In this post, we’ll offer tips on how to tag servers in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. No matter how you organize your tags, it’s important to remember that people aren’t perfect. Therefore, you’ll need to have a protective mechanism in place to handle the inevitable human error that comes with server tagging. Those errors could range from misspelled tags, missing tags or tags that are plain wrong. Azure Resource Manager Policies is a tool from Microsoft Azure to help with just that, and it can be used to enforce tagging right when resources are provisioned. This kind of tool will help with missed tags so you can keep control over your servers. Tagging your servers in Azure According to Azure, each tag consists of a key and a value. One example is the key “Environment” and the value “Production,” so as to distinguish all resources in production. You can choose the tags and values that make the most sense to your…