Are You Fully Embracing Cloud Technology?

Are You Fully Embracing Cloud Technology?

I hear that you are looking to move to the cloud. That’s great, but what does that mean to you? Are you simply looking to move off an aging infrastructure, or should there be more to your cloud migration strategy?

I recently worked with a client who wanted to move his website up to the cloud. Their site was built on .NET, and hosted on Microsoft IIS. The site pulled its data from a local SQL database, and utilized windows service to perform backend procedures. The client’s goal was to walk away from the infrastructure management, and not have to worry about hardware or internet connectivity ever again. They wanted to take a very myopic approach, which involved virtualizing the environment as an Azure Virtual Machine. This may seem like a great solution, but was it enough?

I’ve spent enough time immersed in Microsoft’s Azure technology to answer that question with a resounding NO. You’ve removed the reliability issues of broken hardware and lost internet connections from the equation, but many downsides still remain. You can’t ignore your management responsibilities. It’s a virtual machine, so you still need to manage the operating system and all of the applications. That includes installation, upgrades, patch management, anti-virus and backups. You are still locked into an environment that is still stuck in time, and will continue to require complex upgrade paths in the future. The inherent problem of operation system and application dependencies remain.

Rethink Your Solutions

My advice to the client was to use this as an opportunity to rethink the website. Microsoft offers many different cloud solutions to remove the dependencies of applications and operating systems from your code. You can segment the environments from each other, and focus on the success of your code.

My solution involved replacing IIS with Microsoft Azure Web Apps, replacing Windows Services with Microsoft Azure Web Jobs and replacing SQL with Azure SQL. I’m not going to deep dive into each technology here, but there are some basic fundamental advantages to this approach. The most obvious is no longer having to manage the operating system or applications. Microsoft builds in backup and recovery plans, as well as monitoring and alerting. You can take advantage of automatic resource scaling up and out during peak times, and scale back to save money when needed. Your developers will love the built in API’s and Web Hooks, which give you new ways to tie your Azure applications together.

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What is your cloud strategy? If you are not sure, then let Beringer Technology Group guide you thru the cloud.

Please contact us and see how we can help you.