Cloud integration consulting from IT Svit
Every business builds its infrastructure and operations based on the skill level, technology and budget available at any point in time. When a UK business decides to move to the cloud, one of the most important questions is how to integrate the existing systems and workflows with the cloud components.
Naturally, every company wants to ensure the manageability and reliability of scheduling for new product feature releases, cost-efficiency of performing cloud-based IT operations at scale, resilience and security of storing sensitive data and running mission-critical systems.
All of these concerns can be addressed through a correct configuration of appropriate cloud computing features from providers like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. However, replacing all of your on-prem or dedicated server systems with vendor-specific analogs leads only to vendor lock-in, which is not the best decision.
Ensuring business flexibility using open-source cloud tools
This is why IT Svit prefers to replace most of the cloud-specific features with open-source alternatives. Such cloud integration ensures your business can adapt swiftly and update system configuration based on business needs with ease — all the way up to performing a cloud migration to another service provider without any issues or major downtime for your operations.
We achieve this by using powerful and flexible cloud-based tools listed below:
- Terraform is an infrastructure orchestration tool developed by HashiCorp and available under the open-source model. It allows leveraging the benefits of configuring your Infrastructure as Code through the use of textual files written in descriptive language, manifests.These manifests are stored in your project repository on GitHub or GitLab and can ve easily versioned by changing the required infrastructure parameters. Once configured, these manifests can be used by any team member to procure the environments they need for testing, building and staging purposes, greatly reducing the time-to-market for new product features development. Terraform can run on any major cloud provider and greatly simplifies infrastructure management operations.
- Kubernetes is an open-source platform developed by Google enabling container management and infrastructure configuration at scale. Kubernetes clusters help automate the scaling, management and monitoring of various cloud systems, allowing any business to run their applications in the cloud securely and predictably.Kubernetes is the cornerstone of successful cloud integration, as it has powerful APIs that allow connecting to a huge variety of cloud-specific and open-source tools to form cohesive and performant systems and enable system monitoring, in-depth logging, smart alerting, real-time Big Data analytics and so on.
- Docker. Docker is the solution for creating, storing and running containers — lightweight code packages, which can contain all the runtime required to launch any piece of software. The two main benefits of Docker are that these containers can run on any system where Docker is installed and that containers consume tenfold fewer resources as compared to virtual machines.Thus said, app containerization ensures your products run in the same environment wherever they are launched, consume only a handful of resources an are easily manageable, as rebooting or shutting down a container is nearly instant. This immensely simplifies application management in production and greatly increases the cost-efficiency of operations.
These three platforms form the backbone of cloud infrastructure integration, while tools like Jenkins, Ansible, ELK stack, SumoLogic, Prometheus & Grafana enable automation of operations, simple monitoring and log processing, visualization of system parameters, etc. By composing the systems using these tools, configuring them correctly and integrating them with your existing systems and workflows, IT Svit can ensure the successful accomplishment of a cloud integration project for any UK business.
If you need assistance with cloud integration — our team can provide the consulting and implementation services to help you reach the business objectives set!
