Go Big on the Cloud with 10 Proven Best Practices

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Cheers my cloud community friends, this week I would love to share the post titled “Go Big on the Cloud with 10 Proven Best Practices”. This is from The Doppler Quarterly; all credit goes to Robert Christiansen.

And it’s very clear that 2018 is going to Cloud year, with public cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. IBM and Alibaba cloud are started their game now seriously, wish to be part of real game in next year. The cloud is for everyone, but not for the everything, hence while we are designing and implementing the cloud projects to get benefits from the AI, IoT, and Block chain ecosystem; we should follow few of the industry proven best practices. And the success in our current cloud big data projects is due to following the maximum number of principles given. And the cloud thriving is not only for the operational cost, but also it brings the business agility in a sustainable way.

• Naming and tagging: It is a way to assign metadata to public clouds like GCP, AWS, and Azure in the form of tags. It’s a key-value pair technical it enables the management, discovery, searching, and reporting of the cloud resources. It helps to categories the environments like dev, test, stage, and prod. Hence from the cloud concept days, the tagging structure is mandate.
• Tool selection and strategy: It is very much critical in the cloud ecosystem, and which is not like the on-premise tool selection. It would include IAM, directory services, endpoint protection, backup, incident management, resiliency. Hence selection of tools with right strategy would bring us the highly agile system for both Business, IT, and OT teams.
• Patch management: And very much like on-premise we need to the patch management regularly in the cloud too, and it applies to cloud management tools, OS, and others. It should be automated as much as possible, and with the thumb rule of automate everything. And the patch management brings more agility to the business application on the cloud.
• Cloud account structure: The Cloud account structure brings more organized way of maintaining the cloud, with cloud economics. This helps us with the separate billing, and provides clear lines between the business application and other applications like research and development, and much more.
• IAM Polices and roles: Identity Access Management policies and roles provides the ability to securely control access to services and resources for users to perform their job, and it applies to individual and group.
• Encryption and key management: All the cloud providers are offering key management system(KMS) as a service for the seamless centralized control over keys used to encrypt data on the cloud. And GCP, will do all the data encrypted when it’s at rest. KMS gives the option of data protection and features for scalability and availability when implementing key management at enterprise scale.
• Backup and snapshot standards: In the cloud world also, we need to take back up just like that we did in on-premise world. And here the approach is different but brings lot of control and ease, and especially taking backup is one side of the coin, and the other side of the coin is retrieval. In the cloud ecosystem both the back-up and retrieval will be cloud nine, if we properly designed the backup system.
• Virtual Networking: Virtual networking is the logical isolation of resource via software-defined network. All the three major cloud services providers are offering the virtual networking services. And it’s not the same as on-premise, hence we needed the huge mind shift, and it’s so important to success in our cloud projects.
• Monitoring and logging: Monitoring and logging in the cloud ecosystem offers significantly greater visibility into the operation of our environment. And it takes the on a whole new meaning when all infrastructures services are accessible via API. And it’s not a reactive, but it is proactive and preventative; which is the new thinking is needed for the cloud monitoring and logging adoptions.
• Continuous governance and cost management: The faster we run, the better we control our system. Hence, we need to continuously protect all the virtual machines in the public cloud, and even the other service assets. It goes fine if we implement the standard governance framework which brings the hygiene of the cloud ecosystem. It is the holy grail of the agility on the cloud.

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