A Webinar for C-level Executives and Tech Leaders On Accelerating Cloud Adoption

Gain actionable insights into the power of Kubernetes, regardless of your background,  whether business owner, IT professional, or tech enthusiast, with this webinar on streamlining cloud adoption with ready-to-use templates!

Rejith Krishnan, Founder and CEO of Cloud Control, and Felicjan Rybka, Marketing Manager of Maxima Consulting, shared their valuable insights on expediting your cloud adoption in this exclusive webinar. Get the inside scoop on ready-to-use templates that can help you achieve your goals faster than ever before. 

With the growing adoption of cloud technology in practically every aspect of business, many are either transitioning or already utilizing cloud-based solutions with varying degrees of success. This article addresses common questions and challenges that may arise in this process.

Cloud migration has a substantial impact on companies. The advantages of transitioning to the cloud are numerous:

• A better time to market and better scalability: As everything is software-defined and virtual, new servers and services can be acquired quickly. Custom templates with built-in clustering, replication, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities help businesses expand and grow without delay.
• Lowering the cost of ownership: Deploying a server in private infrastructure comes with a fixed upfront cost, followed by recurring investments for maintenance and advancements. Cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle streamline this process by managing servers. This template excels in resiliency and cost control via efficient features like auto-patching, self-healing, and alert management.
• Agility and Speed: As you seek to incorporate novel features, like adopting cloud-based services and catering to your client’s needs, agility can be the key to delivering seamless solutions on time. The process becomes smoother and snappier when leveraging CI/CD, with automated templates making builds and deployments quicker and easier to manage.
• Enhanced collaboration: Amidst the pandemic, the Cloud has enabled remote working, collaborative efforts, and flexible computing power. While earlier discussions on cloud computing revolved around boosting innovation, speeding up time to market, and reducing costs, the current scenario offers even more. From ensuring high availability and improving workforce management to strengthening core business processes and achieving business continuity, cloud computing has become a boon. Plus, it provides disaster recovery mechanisms and lowers backup costs while facilitating business agility.
• Improving security and reliability: Investing in safeguarding infrastructure costs businesses significant money. Cloud services can help cut those costs and improve security. Companies can achieve greater security and compliance using state-of-the-art templates, enterprise-grade guardrails, and a zero-trust approach.
• Innovation and accessibility: In today’s fast-paced, software-defined world, innovation knows no bounds. The sky is the limit when it comes to surpassing client expectations. A perfect example of this is ChatGPT. An effective approach to using the Cloud is to utilize pre-defined templates, as they offer advantages like infrastructure-as-code and GitOps control. Having templates for varying application requirements makes achieving scalability, governance, and compliance easier. Ultimately, having these templates will optimize efficiency throughout the development process. 

One critical method for reaping benefits is leveraging templates. It’s paramount that businesses have a firm grasp on the Cloud’s purpose and the incentives behind transitioning. Discover the benefits of utilizing templates for cloud adoption below:

• Infrastructure as a code: Cloud computing is an essential infrastructure as code, meaning it is software-defined. Developers can input code, allowing seamless collaboration between the infrastructure and development teams.
• GitOps: GitOps empowers developers with complete control over the entire process. The GitOps engine seamlessly automates app development and deployment when a developer initiates a commit. The primary goal is streamlining the app development process, saving time and resources.
• Autoscaling: Developers should prioritize the right infrastructure’s availability and leverage the cloud’s scalability potential to address traffic or promotional issues. With suitable templates, managing the process can become manageable, given the varying scalability capacities across different applications.
• Governance and compliance: Utilizing templates facilitates the generation of precise reports for authorities and guarantees the utmost security of all client data.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing: Since all templates are predefined, the team can effectively streamline the application deployment process, leading to continuous improvement.
• Disaster Recovery: The DR and HA templates offer developers a reliable solution. For instance, in Region 1 downtime, Region 2 can quickly be restored. This template ensures continuous and efficient disaster recovery by simplifying and streamlining the process, bolstering the resilience of business applications, whether on-premise or in the public cloud.

The cloud is software-defined, meaning you can run or program scripts. At the same time, the cloud providers provide you with UI to click through. So you’ll have two choices: code it or go to the console and press buttons. The problem with the clicking button is that it is an easy way in but not repeatable. For example, you may get one outcome utilizing one of your team members today. However, when you want to replicate the procedure the next day and the same individual is unavailable, you will have no idea what button they clicked.

Cloud providers interact with APIs or software to enable direct access to programs via buttons. Templates automate and script everything in a repeatable process that relies on choosing the right templates for each operation. The challenge lies in implementing a template-based model. Without it, the manual process of using checkboxes and buttons is prone to human error and cannot be repeated with precision.

Consider a large business that suffered a devastating cyber-attack due to a person accidentally clicking the wrong button, leaving a gap open. The real shock came when they discovered, five years later, that the attackers had been stealing their data all along. This incident highlights the importance of repeatability when working with cloud systems. Auditable processes are critical for identifying issues and ensuring prevention. Organizations are better served by employing repeatable templates rather than relying on the error-prone manual approach of console-based processes. Although transitioning to more controlled and automatable processes may prove difficult, it can be accomplished using templates.

Eliminating human error from business processes can yield valuable long-term benefits for companies. Rather than relying solely on a human approach, firms can create templates and workflows that provide numerous efficiency gains and other advantages.

Figure 1: AppZ Platform 

A source control system is one of the best ways to create and manage templates. One popular option is Github.com, though alternatives like Gitlab, BitBucket, and others exist. Cloud providers such as AWS and Azure have their own Git. It’s up to businesses to decide which Git to use, but having a Git-based procedure in place is crucial. In the infrastructure diagram provided, tasks are divided among teams responsible for managing templates, teams using templates, and developers and engineers. These roles are fundamental for executing various duties required in a cloud scenario.

Stack engineers oversee the architecture templates on the left, followed by developers, operations, and approvers. This enables a template-based workflow, where the engineers maintain a Git repository for all templates, and the developers and operations maintain theirs for their parameters. Essentially, templates can be produced and source-controlled like software and parameterized to suit. This approach ensures that templates are easily managed and customized for efficient workflow implementation.

For instance, a template and ten parameters need to be set to develop a site. The developers or operations team handle the parameters, while the stack engineers manage the templates, in line with the Git flow approach. The pipeline is initiated automatically upon parameter commit, deploying the cloud infrastructure.

Following the software development lifecycle is a best practice for cloud computing. Separating roles is crucial to ensure that at least three people review any modifications. By establishing a repeatable process with minimal human error, we aim to manage the human element’s significance throughout the process.

Our healthcare client in the US created an innovative digital platform. They needed to install it in the Cloud, but manual installation would have taken six to eight months. We used pre-fabricated, tested, and hardened templates to onboard their application in six weeks. Each cloud provider offers a templating system, so businesses must choose based on their needs. Our achievement was reducing the migration time from six months to under six weeks. In six weeks, our team delivered optimal solutions and the best practices for the customer. Now, firms adopting the ‘army of people’ approach commonly leverage cloud-based tools to manage human resources. Therefore, businesses approaching cloud technology should work alongside system integrators. These integrators would bring anywhere between 10 to 100 workers to suit the scale of the company’s cloud migration workload. This process employs a combination of manual and automated efforts to ensure seamless integration into the cloud space.

When you employ a pre-tested template model, you reach a point where all the best practices are in place since all the templates are already coded with all the best practices and industry-secured guidelines. We obtained certification from the auditors for the specific healthcare company within a 10-week. Within ten weeks, the application became online. We went through many audits with various clients and were able to reuse all of that expertise, as well as the template itself, to increase the speed.

Our product has been placed on AWS Marketplace. AWS awarded us a ‘Qualified Software’ badge, validating our platform on AWS! We are also expanding our platform’s reach to Azure, Google, and Oracle clouds.

The age-old problem of developing vs. purchasing IT solutions remains a critical challenge for businesses today. While organizations may have the resources to create their templates, finding the time to do so is a hurdle. Cloud providers offer a solution with ready-to-use templates backed by extensive documentation and certifications. By utilizing our market-proven templates, businesses can hasten their onboarding process and confidently embark on their cloud journey.

Organizations must consult providers to estimate and acquire vital information regarding networks, database speeds, and available cloud support. Luckily, most providers offer ready-to-use templates to simplify business processes, such as AWS cloud formation templates and Kubernetes Helm charts. Opting for a provider that supplies efficient templates to launch and maintain your applications can positively impact results.

One crucial aspect is ensuring that templates are designed with parameterization in mind. Businesses must identify the common denominators across various use cases for a specific workload. A notable example is utilizing Springboot for backend development. Organizations can achieve maximum reusability by creating a single Springboot template that can be adapted to all applications through parameterization. It is imperative for businesses to thoroughly analyze various Springboot use cases and observe how different applications leverage it. The goal is to ensure all templates are reusable, optimizing their effectiveness through parameterization.

Cloud Control offers comprehensive assessments and expert guidance on template selection and implementation. We provide insights on which templates to use and proactively assist in choosing the most suitable templating mechanism. Enhance your efficiency and achieve optimal results with Cloud Control. Our webinar is available on our YouTube channel for anyone who may have missed it.

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