Cloud Computing Archives

Understanding and controlling your Microsoft Azure bill

August 29, 2017

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…

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What is cloud sprawl?

August 8, 2017

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…

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What is Azure Stack?

August 3, 2017

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,…

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Hybrid cloud vs Multi-cloud: Key differences

July 31, 2017

“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…

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How to tag your servers in AWS and Azure

June 21, 2017

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…

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What is server tagging in public cloud, and why is it important?

June 13, 2017

For organizations that use public cloud services, the biggest goal is to optimize the usage and spend of those services. It all comes back to cost management and control–it’s all too easy to lose control of your cloud spend, especially when you don’t know who is spinning up more servers or whether they’re being used in the most cost-effective way. CIOs are experimenting with server tagging as a way to overcome this challenge. What is server tagging? Essentially, it’s creating a name and a value for each VM you have in your cloud environment. Examples of server tagging include by geographic region, department, application, server role (web server, database) or environment (production, QA). You can assign multiple tags if you wish to further specify who is using which servers (but note that this is not always possible). You can also set up rules to tag servers within a timely fashion or destroy them otherwise, eliminating the risk that tags won’t be implemented. With the information gathered from server tags, you can develop more meaningful financial and usage reports to present to your boss or board of directors. Why server tagging Server tagging is important because it gives you back control over…

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How to Achieve Scalability in a Hybrid Cloud

May 30, 2017

In today’s modern IT world, whether you have a new project, line of business, or a newer version of an existing product line, you’ll need to scale, and scale quickly. More organizations have been turning to hybrid cloud to do that, and the market reflects that–according to RightScale, hybrid cloud is the preferred strategy for enterprises. Why is the hybrid cloud the best way to scale your environment? A public cloud delivers resources over the internet instead of being tied to hardware, which means it’s easy to grow virtual servers. This all sounds simple, but there are a few challenges that can prevent you from scaling properly and reaching your business goals. These include talent acquisition, difficulty with the platform, surprising billing, or a public cloud outage, all of which can lead to serious problems for public cloud users. How does hybrid scale differently? But hybrid cloud provides the scalability most businesses seek by integrating public cloud resources with an organization’s existing infrastructure, so they can provide new capabilities to their end user while reducing costs even more. Essentially, hybrid cloud solutions give organizations unlimited resources on demand while maximizing their existing infrastructure investments. Businesses like the flexibility behind the…

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How to provision resources in the cloud

May 22, 2017

According to RightScale, lack of resources/expertise was cited as the No. 1 challenge in enterprise cloud adoption, with 32 percent of those surveyed naming it as their biggest concern. While that number fell in 2017, resources (or lack thereof) still remain a high priority for organizations looking to move to the cloud or who are already using it. If you’re experiencing rapid growth or a need to become more agile, you’re probably looking at the public cloud or already in it. But do you have the experts you need to manage it for you? As you know, the cloud offers many benefits, including increased efficiency and growth, coupled with decreased maintenance and CAPEX spending. A hybrid cloud furthers those benefits by giving you the added ability to place your workloads where they fit best. This could be in a public or private cloud, a data center, or even a bare metal server. Determining which applications and where all of their components (databases, dev environments, etc.) belong can be tricky though, as well as finding people properly trained in public and private cloud architecture, so it’s critical that you have a solution that lowers your costs instead of adding to them. Does your current provider offer…

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How to manage your cloud bill

May 15, 2017

Part of the cloud’s blessing and curse is your monthly cloud bill. It can either be amazingly cheap, or amazingly expensive. For most organizations, it’s hard to truly take advantage of the efficiency of cloud if they don’t know what their bill will be from month to month. According to Rightscale’s State of the Cloud report for 2017, the most cited challenge among mature cloud users was managing cloud costs. So what can you do to control this? The right provider matters It boils back down to finding the right cloud service provider. Should you choose to manage your cloud yourself, you’ll want a solid internal support team and be prepared to pay extra for external support. If you choose a managed service provider, look for one who can provide direct support and expertise when it comes time to analyze your bill. In the case of hybrid cloud, we’re talking about multiple clouds and potential multiple providers, what with combining your public cloud services with either a private cloud or legacy IT solution. For this, a cloud aggregator may prove helpful. Remember, a cloud aggregator is someone who negotiates and distributes cloud services from vendors in an effort to be as cost effective…

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Compliant cloud services and how to maintain them

May 9, 2017

According to a recent Gartner report, nearly half of large enterprises will deploy hybrid cloud environments by the end of this year. That level of growth is super exciting for the cloud, as more organizations take advantage of a digital-based strategy. However, despite the maturity of the cloud, many CIOs still express concerns. There are two major challenges organizations face in a hybrid cloud environment (or any environment, really.) One is security, which we’ve covered. The other? Compliance. We talked about it a little in our hybrid cloud security post, but we’ll go into more detail about its importance and how you can achieve compliance in a hybrid environment. In the olden days of public cloud, there was a serious challenge to properly securing sensitive data, particularly PHI. Those who had to follow regulation guidelines, especially the healthcare industry, had a healthy amount of skepticism around jumping on the cloud bandwagon right away, and rightfully so. If you wanted to move to the cloud, you had to develop your own entirely private cloud, which was more expensive and harder to scale than public cloud. Compliance in the public cloud was very difficult—the onus was on the customer to ensure not only…

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