Demystifying the cloud - Part 5: Understanding Integration, Hybrid and Migration services

This is the final part of a group of posts that aims to demystify the cloud for non-cloud experts and provide a framework in which to think about the services cloud can provide. In essence, to make cloud simple.

It follows the premise that all the cloud providers have essentially the same types of core services, with various strengths and benefits.  As we progress to a situation where most organisations use multiple clouds for different purposes, it is useful to understand the higher concepts and how they relate to each other.  Only then can you go down to the next level and understand what makes one cloud different to another, and why you might use one cloud provider for one use case and another cloud for a different one.

To recap, in the first post of the series, we talked about the high level service categories which can be broken down into: 

In this post, let’s go down to the next level and understand the service types that fit into the Integration, Hybrid and Migration categories.  Ie. How do cloud services interoperate with the existing on premise applications or users. 

Integration

A key component of any application is integration. How do inter-related services, people or organisations communicate with each other make a bigger system. The core services are:

With the increased interest in MicroServices and containers, APIs and API mgmt has become increasingly more important. It is one thing to have a few, hundreds or thousands of APIs but how do other people find, understand what the service does and then use. This is one of the roles of the API mgmt services. They also have processes to manage API attacks as well as such things as throttling so an API isn’t overwhelmed and brings the system down.

Another useful service is the use of workflow management tools. These tools help string together API’s or other services together into an end to end process. This makes it easier to visualise and understand where bottlenecks occur. They can also include manual steps where a human needs to get involved to progress to the next step. Eg. Approve an action.

The final service here are notification services. Ie. the ability to send and SMS or email to either an operations person in case of a failure or to an end user in the case of marketing/informational messages.  

Hybrid Connectivity

It is unlikely that an organisation will be completely in the cloud. At least not ones that have been operating for a long time or of a decent size.  Therefore it is likely that most organisations will need to understand how their on-premises applications inter-operate with their cloud applications. The core services in this category are:

There are two key ways an organisation can connect to their cloud services. The first is using a standard VPN and going over the public cloud. The second is using a dedicated connection through a local interconnect supplier. The benefit of a dedicated interconnect is predominantly speed and throughput so if you have a lot of data to move then this is likely to be the best option. But of course it is more expensive and time consuming to setup and use. A VPN on the other can be set up almost immediately if you have the knowledge and information required.

Once you have determined the best way to connect to the cloud the next is setting up how your users will connect. Ultimately you wouldn’t want your users to have 2 seperate accounts - one for your local on-premises network and one for your cloud applications. Therefore you should look at how you can federate your organisations credentials with the cloud provider. This could either through user and password synchronisation or you can force your cloud identity service to go back to your on-premises solutions such as active directory every time a user makes a request. 

The final hybrid service listed here is Hybrid storage. This allows users/applications on-premise to access almost unlimited storage in the cloud. The typical use cases might include moving tape backups to the cloud, reducing on-premises storage with cloud-backed file shares, providing low latency access to data in the cloud for on-premises applications, as well as various migration, archiving, processing, and disaster recovery use cases.  

Migration

The final set of services we will cover is how to migrate your data and applications. Each cloud provider tries to make it as easy as possible for you to migrate and therefore consume their services on-going. Luckily the type of migration can be easily compartmentalised into the following core categories:

The first use case is to migrate data that is on your on-premises storage over the connection you have. These tools allow you to manage transfer of large files by breaking them up and be configured to parallelise if possible to increase throughput. They also have auto-recovery features if connections are dropped.

However for very large datasets, it might take days, weeks or even years to migrate your data over the net. In these cases, all the providers provide a service that allows disks to be shipped manually and then connected directly to the cloud provider's network and the data uploaded. In extreme cases, they also have trucks that can back up to your facility, download the data and then offload it at the other end. 

VM’s are slightly trickier to migrate as you don’t actually want to migrate the physical machine but you do want to take note of the configuration specs and stand-up equivalent ones in the cloud. Unless your going all in and re-factoring an application.

A good service to help organisations move to the cloud are database migration services. These allow easy replication of existing databases to either the equivalent in the cloud or the conversion into a more cloud-native database. This can involve both once off migrations or on-going synchronisation. 

The last service covered here are the discovery tools that operate on premise. They help search the network, catalog existing VM’s and applications in order to help understand what needs to move and provide an understanding of the capacity required.

Summary

In this final post in the series, we have dug a little deeper and explained the different types of Integration, Hybrid and migration services you will find across most cloud providers.  

While we haven’t covered every single service, we have covered the predominant ones that are used and need to be understood. As was quoted in the first blog post in the series, a typical organisation only uses approximately 15 services. We have covered about 60 service types which hopefully would give a good understanding of the landscape. Only once you understand the landscape, can then dig down into the details where required. 

As mentioned previously, while understanding conceptually what type of services a cloud provider has, the true magic happens when you start integrating them into patterns for devops, microservices, and data & analytics.  We will cover these patterns in later posts.

For access to the full reference list, download our free resource here.

If you want more information regarding any of our services to help reduce the complexity of the cloud, please contact us at contact@cloudmill.com.au.