Category Archives: Art of BI
Application Migration Service (AMS): Disaster & Recovery
Have you ever been in a situation like the following?
Manager: Hey team, management wants us to test our disaster recovery plan.
Team Member: When do they need it done by?
Manager: They are hoping within the next two weeks if that is possible…
Team Member: We have never done a test before!
Team Member: We don’t even know if we can fail back if we perform one.
If you have found yourself in this situation, this blog will help solve this issue. Let’s get started!
What is Application Migration Service?
Application Migration Service is an AWS service for disaster recovery (DR), backup, and migrations. At a high-level, Application Migration Service “performs block-level replication” via an installed agent that can be deployed onto servers. This agent then replicates to an Amazon EC2 Instance which has an EBS volume connected. This agent copies the associated data from servers to staging area in AWS and replicates in real time.
Why is Application Migration Service Important?
Unlike running a “ad-hoc” disaster recovery scenario like the above, a simple conversation between a manager and team member, and then you can be prepared to have a DR using Application Migration Service at any time. With its robust features Application Migration Service solves these three problems:
Problem 1: How do I afford running my memory/cpu packed host in the cloud?
Solution: Machines feature
Within the migration service you can setup a replication server to be a specific size. If you are running in a DR mode and you can handle not having the same machine size for cost saving reasons, you can map the machine to run at a lower tier until the disaster is over. Then you can simply “recover” back to your original setup.
Problem 2: How do I document my disaster recovery plan?
Solution: Recovery Plans feature
With the ability to define a recovery plan within Application Migration Service, you have your documentation not only available but viewable for any person to see. You could specify steps (order) that must be taken before specific machines are moved over. Example: if your application servers must wait for a database to come online you can add that step.
Problem 3: How can I run a full-blown DR test?
Solutions: Test Mode feature
With full capabilities to test, you can run a test scenario and offload part of your application workload to the newly created environment. You can watch as the resources are spun up and then you can terminate them. With this ability, you don’t even have to have a full “switchover” as a test, as you can see in real-time the DR setup from the console.
Final Thoughts
Using Application Migration Service for disaster recovery is essential to keeping your data secure and it’s important to have the knowledge around AMS when you get that last minute request to do a DR test. My hope is that you can refer back to this blog in a time of need. The good news is that disaster recovery is only one aspect of AMS, you can also use it to migrate services to AWS, stay tuned for my next blog on the topic. If you’re looking for Application Migration Service support, contact us. We’re an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with a multitude of expertise in AWS technology.
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Why Your Website Needs the Scalability and Availability of the Cloud
As more people live essential parts of their lives online, their expectations for website performance and user experience rise. These heightened expectations can impact business success.
For example, according to one study, 47 percent of visitors expect your website to load in 2 seconds or less—and if it doesn’t, they’ll have no problem clicking away to find what they’re looking for elsewhere. Meanwhile, research and advisory firm Gartner estimates that the average cost of IT downtime is roughly $5,600 per minute, or more than $300,000 per hour; the costs can be even higher for large organizations or e-commerce websites that depend on a steady flow of traffic.
Given these issues, scalability and availability need to be essential concerns for any company that depends on its website to do business or offer services to its customers. By migrating your website hosting from on-premises to the cloud, you can improve your site’s reliability, performance, and uptime while leveraging the advantages of public cloud ecosystems.
Scalability and Availability for Websites in the Cloud
In cloud computing, “scalability” refers to the ability of an application or service to dynamically expand or contract its capacity as necessary (e.g., during times of peak usage). “Availability,” meanwhile, refers to the amount of time that an application or service is accessible.
Both scalability and availability can be dramatically increased when moving your website to cloud hosting:
- Scaling in the cloud is much easier than scaling inflexible on-premises servers. Websites hosted in the cloud can take advantage of horizontal scaling, distributing and balancing the increased load across multiple servers to prevent overloading any one of them. On the other hand, on-premises resources have fixed capacity, and it’s difficult to scale them without making an expensive capital purchase. In addition, the extra on-premises resources you purchase will go unused much of the time, and you may spend more than you need if you don’t correctly estimate the amounts of peak usage.
- Many cloud providers offer a guaranteed uptime percentage in their service level agreement (SLA). For example, the Microsoft Azure SLA guarantees 99.9 percent uptime (or more) for its various cloud services, which corresponds to downtime of roughly 9 hours over an entire year.
Hosting your website in the cloud also offers benefits in terms of disaster recovery and business continuity. The best public cloud providers offer automatic backups and data replication, letting you quickly restore operations in the event of data loss.
On the other hand, on-premises backups need to be handled manually, and hosting your website on-site puts you at risk of a natural disaster, such as a flood or fire.
Case Study: Major Utility Company
One of Datavail’s clients, a major Canadian utility company, was faced with several pain points when refreshing its outdated front-facing customer website. Just 8 percent of the client’s customers were paying their bills online, which was costing the client millions in mailing expenses.
Part of the problem: the client’s existing website suffered from a clunky user experience and archaic technology. In particular, the website needed to be more mobile-friendly and accessible for customers with disabilities. The client was also concerned about the website’s scalability and availability, especially during times of peak usage such as storms and widespread power outages.
Datavail worked with the client to refresh and modernize its outdated customer website, with a particular focus on cloud computing. Although the client faced data sovereignty issues that required it to maintain its customer data on-premises, Datavail helped the client design a hybrid cloud architecture and migrate the website infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.
The client now uses fast, modern cloud services such as Azure Data Factory for ETL data integration and Azure App Service for building and deploying web applications. Thanks to its partnership with Datavail, the client has slashed postal costs due to a fivefold increase in customers paying online via the new modernized and customer friendly website. In addition to the OpEx savings, the customer has also significantly improved its website’s JD Powers customer satisfaction rankings.
Want to make your website more robust, user-friendly, scalable, and available by migrating to the cloud? Datavail can assist you. Find out how we helped one client by reading our case study “Major Utility Company Improves Residential Customer Website Experience with Azure.”
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5 Challenges You Didn’t Know You Would Face with Azure Cloud
It’s hard to beat the benefits of Microsoft Azure, especially for companies already heavily invested in other Microsoft products. In fact, in early 2020, CNBC reported that Microsoft continued to lead the pack as one of the most popular suppliers of public cloud services, especially with larger companies.
But as they say, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and the power of Azure is no exception. As a customizable and flexible cloud service, it also requires expertise and commitment to develop, configure and maintain one’s Azure cloud.
Once you’ve made the investment in Azure, you may find yourself unexpectedly encountering the following five challenging scenarios.
1. Large and Complex Migrations
Depending on which systems you’re moving to Azure, you could have a pretty hefty lift on your hands. If you are, for example, migrating your entire database infrastructure to Azure- your data warehouse into Azure Synapse; your analytics in Power BI, or any other combinations thereof, it is imperative that the appropriate level of planning is undertaken before moving your databases, applications, or services to Azure.
Microsoft does provide some good general resources for a migration of any size, with recommendations for strategizing, planning, optimizing, and modernizing your migration. Their documentation will be very helpful in the pre-planning stages as you attempt to get your arms around your vision as a whole. But complex projects like this require rigorous planning, staggered migration timelines, and thorough follow-through to ensure successful execution of plans. It’s an all-hands-on-deck initiative that can span many months or even years.
2. Integrations
Because Azure is so versatile, you can leverage the extensive integration capabilities with a wide range of applications, tools, and services. This means that you have a lot of integration points to manage and a lot of details to track as you attempt to connect all the pieces. Detailed planning, tracking, and testing are vital as you attempt to ensure that all the dots are thoroughly connected – and that you don’t get caught up in troubleshooting once you go live. This can be particularly challenging when building a hybrid environment.
Azure has several tools to help you on your journey to connectedness like Logic Apps, Service Bus, and API Management to name a few, and these can go a long way in reducing the amount of time you put into integrations. Overall, Azure is well-positioned to function optimally with on-premises systems, but you have to build a process that takes advantage of human and technological resources to keep all your ducks in a row.
3. Unusual Uses and Applications
The beauty of Microsoft Azure is that it has both breadth and depth – it is the right solution for so many different situations, even obscure ones. The downside of this is that unique deployments of Azure won’t have clear-cut strategies and steps for implementation and management. You’ll be able to stretch and flex in many new and interesting ways, but without an experienced partner to help, you may find that trial-and-error and Bing searches leave you frustrated and lost. The more services you take advantage of, the greater chance that you’ll need help and direction along the way.
Here’s an interesting example of this from the Microsoft Ignite conference in March 2021. They discuss using agile development, automated deployments, infrastructure as code, and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to manage a complex migration.
4. Administration and Monitoring
Many an IT Director has assumed that administration and monitoring come with the Azure platform, and have found themselves under-resourced when the engine is up and running. While the cloud takes many day-to-day administrative tasks off an IT department’s plate, it may actually increase the management hours required to keep those services running and stabilized. In the case of Azure, its administration and monitoring capabilities are scattered throughout the various components and services, so you will need to be sure you have the talent who can holistically stay on top of everything.
5. Application Modernization
Your initial focus when migrating to Azure will be simply getting it up and running so your users can start taking advantage of the benefits as soon as possible. But what about further down the road? Technology advancements move quickly, and you will certainly find yourself facing a modernization project in the near future. While this challenge might not hit you until further down the road, the time to prepare is now; get the right people, partners, and resources on board so you’re prepared for the changes to come.
Datavail was contracted to help an organization in a similar situation. An international multi-campus college based in Canada needed help modernizing their student portal – built on Microsoft Azure – to enable self-service, greater efficiency, and additional strategic features. You can read the details of the case study to learn how the college worked with Datavail to bring their Azure-based portal into the 21st century.
Microsoft Azure Cloud has a lot to offer companies of all sizes with its infrastructure, platform, and software as a service offerings. You may recognize the challenges above from your own experiences, or you may be wondering how you will combat these challenges as you begin your journey with Azure. To get answers to your questions, download our white paper, “5 Companies That Solved Common Challenges with Azure Cloud.”
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Datavail Achieves AWS Service Delivery Designation for Amazon RDS
Datavail has reached an exciting milestone: We’ve achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Delivery Designation for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). This achievement recognizes that Datavail follows best practices and has proven success delivering AWS services to end customers.
AWS created the AWS Service Delivery Program to highlight AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners that have an exceptional level of expertise in delivering its services. AWS customers are better able to find top service providers with deep specializations in their chosen services, such as Amazon RDS.
What AWS Service Delivery Designation for Amazon RDS Means for Datavail
This achievement differentiates Datavail as an APN member that provides specialized services and demonstrates technical proficiency in delivering Amazon RDS to customers. Only AWS Partners with deep AWS experience and proven success in delivering solutions seamlessly on AWS are recognized with this destination.
Specifically, AWS validated:
- Datavail’s deep understanding of the Amazon RDS service.
- Datavail’s adherence to AWS best practices and security recommendations.
- Datavail’s Amazon RDS experience and successful completion of customers’ projects.
As Amazon RDS adds new features and capabilities, we’ll be front and center in learning how to leverage these updates to better benefit our customers. In addition to having an AWS Service Delivery Designation for Amazon RDS, Datavail is also an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.
What are the Benefits of Using Amazon RDS for Your Cloud Database Infrastructure?
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that acts as an excellent foundation for your organization’s databases. Whether you’re already in the cloud or contemplating a move, this platform offers the opportunity to transform your databases. Its many benefits include:
- Access to AWS’ large infrastructure, with seamless scalability for both compute and storage, high availability, robust security, and cutting-edge cloud-native technology.
- Decreasing operational and administrative expenses through cost-effective, pay-as-you-go services.
- Many regions and availability zones to improve resiliency.
- Automated database backups to protect your valuable data.
- Saving time by shifting maintenance responsibilities for the underlying infrastructure to AWS. You’re able to focus on optimizing your databases and other strategic and proactive goals.
What are the Benefits of Working with an AWS Partner Network Member with the AWS Service Delivery Designation?
Amazon RDS offers many powerful features and streamlines database administration, but you can’t unlock its full value without knowing it inside and out. When you bring on an AWS Partner like Datavail, your organization gains:
- Full access to our proven experience working on AWS projects. We help set you up for success with your Amazon RDS investment, and we’re also well-versed with many other AWS services to further expand your capabilities.
- Added value from our recommendations of the best Amazon RDS deployment options to support your business goals, based on real-world use cases and successful results with other clients.
- A partnership with a service provider that has experience planning, designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining Amazon RDS in a wide variety of use cases, industries, and business sizes.
- A trusted source to answer all your Amazon RDS questions. If you’re not sure what a particular feature does or want to know how to develop applications that are well-suited for this database environment, we’re here to help.
- The ability to bring on Amazon RDS experts on-demand without going through a costly and time-consuming recruitment cycle.
- Database modernization and optimization to help your organization leverage the full power of Amazon RDS.
- Rapid adoption of new Amazon RDS best practices, new features, and other updates. We dedicate ourselves to expanding our knowledge and skills to better help our clients.
- Database administration coverage outside of your organization’s business hours, reducing the need for your in-house team to stay on-call.
- Support for Amazon Aurora MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database technology.
What Datavail Can Do for Your Databases
It’s time to turn your data into a strategic business driver with the help of Datavail and Amazon RDS. Our talented database specialists can handle all your database management, data analytics, and application development needs. We offer every service and skill set needed to maximize the value of your organizational data.
Datavail’s Amazon RDS services include:
- Managing database settings and optimizing configurations for your environment.
- Running health checks to keep your databases running smoothly.
- 24x7 support of your Amazon RDS databases.
- Monitoring performance, fixing problems proactively, and looking for opportunities to improve your database capabilities.
- Keeping your databases highly secured and your data safe.
- Migrating your databases to Amazon RDS.
Are you ready to take the next step in your Amazon RDS journey with Datavail? We’ve guided hundreds of clients through their cloud journeys. Learn more about our Amazon RDS Cloud Database services and let us know how we can support your organization in its cloud journey.
Read This Next
Learn how we have helped customers in the following case studies:
Lucidoc Improves Performance & Reliability with Amazon RDS for Oracle Migration.
Novus Modernizes Tech Stack and Cuts Costs 50% With Amazon RDS and Datavail.
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What You Need to Know About Containerization: An Overview
Containerization is a hot topic for decision-makers in the Application Development (AppDev) space. According to Mordor Intelligence, between 2021 and 2026 the application container market is expected to see a 29 percent compound annual growth rate. And, it makes sense because there are many benefits to using containers.
If you’re thinking of adding containers to your Application Development toolbox, there are things you need to know about containers.
What Is a Container?
Container technology was named after the shipping industry’s use of the term container. Rather than shipping products individually, the shipping industry uses containers that can be placed on a ship that is designed for the containers’ standard size.
Containerization could well represent the future of computing. Containers hold a unit of software that includes the code and all dependencies while allowing it to share the machine’s operating system kernel. Containers allow applications to run efficiently and reduce costs for servers and licensing.
Containers are extremely scalable because of their relatively small deployment size. Additionally, containers are the building blocks in the implementation of Microservice Application Architecture. Microservices afford developers the ability to separate applications into specific units of work, which can speed up Enterprise system development.
The Container Versus Virtual Machine Discussion
Some people wonder about the difference between containers and Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs have been used for a long time and supported the first moves to cloud computing. A VM mimics a physical computer. IT teams using VMs can run the equivalent of multiple machines with multiple operating systems on one computer.
Containers are more lightweight and more agile because they run on a shared operating system kernel. They support microservice architecture, which allows for deploying and scaling application components on a more granular level. Containers have an advantage over VMs because developers don’t always know where the applications they’re building will be deployed. From that standpoint, containers provide more flexibility than VMs.
Typical Container Use Cases
Containers are used in a variety of ways:
- Updating existing cloud applications.
- Developing new applications that can leverage the benefits of using containers.
- Supporting microservices.
- Increasing DevOps output by streamlining the process of building, testing, and deploying new applications.
- Allowing developers to work in a stable production environment.
- Automating repetitive functions.
- Supporting multiple computing environments.
Container Technology
You have several alternatives for container technology. The first major open-source container offering was created by Docker and it’s still the most popular container technology. In fact, it has evolved into the standard for containerization.
When companies have a few containers, management isn’t an issue. However, as the number of containers that must be managed by IT grows, managing them gets more and more complex. This is where container orchestration comes into play. It’s almost impossible to do the management of many containers manually.
Kubernetes offers a container orchestration product that allows you to manage thousands of containerized applications. It’s an open-source tool that the engineers at Google developed and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes automates many aspects of managing containers through scheduling, scaling, and managing the health of containers. Using Kubernetes, you can fully implement and confidently use a container-based infrastructure in your production environments.
There are some concerns about the security of container infrastructures, and you need to be careful when you implement containers. The concern is mainly that if there is a security problem with the container host kernel, it will affect all the containers that are associated with it. Vendors like Docker are working to increase the security for containers such as security scanners that notify admins if there are vulnerabilities in the containers.
How to Get Started with Containers
If you’re just getting started using containers, here are some tips that will help you make informed decisions about creating a container strategy that will work for you. This is a relatively new technology. If you decide it could help your operation, consider whether you have the in-house expertise to make it a success. This is a time when many companies look to outside partners to provide expertise and knowledge transfer to use containerization to its greatest benefit.
- Do you have the expertise?
Containers are a hot topic and finding the expertise you need can be a challenge. Decide if you can hire the expertise you need or whether you want to work with a partner to grow your own experts.
- Do you know what containers and microservices can contribute to your operation?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of using the latest technology because you know your competitors are using it. Start with an in-depth analysis to determine which of your applications can benefit from containerization and what it would take to implement it.
- How mature is your Agile and DevOps Process?
If you are in the early stages of using Agile and DevOps processes, determine what it would take to include containerization in your operation. Containers can help you to make the transition to more Agile development, but it will require changes to how you do things now. Decide how you will help your teams integrate this new approach.
- Can you keep up with a rapidly changing technology?
Today, most technology is changing rapidly, but it’s not that much of an issue when you already have a solid base of expertise and knowledge to help you keep up with the changes. You’ll need people, either your own or a partner’s, who have the expertise in containerization to make sure you can decrease risk and monitor implementation.
- What is involved in converting your applications?
Take a look at your existing applications and determine what would need to be done to turn them into one or more containers. Some applications are so connected or disconnected from data or other components that it will be extremely difficult to containerize them. You need to decide if the benefits of containerization are worth the effort.
Luckily other applications will be easy to turn into containers. It’s similar to the evaluation you probably conducted when you decided to move some of your applications to the cloud. The same type of calculations of the total cost of ownership will apply.
- Should you containerize or convert to DevOps first?
Both evolutions have requirements for training and/or hiring. In some cases, it may be more beneficial to move to containers first, then address the issue of transforming to a DevOps environment. In many cases, you can reduce risk and costs.
Next Steps
As technology is evolving, it’s likely you’ll need the benefits of containerization at some point in time. You’ll need a strategy to incorporate containers where they make sense and to identify applications that you want to prepare now for containerization when the timing is right.
Datavail is an expert and trusted leader in the areas of AppDev and DevOps. We can help you benefit from containerization in a controlled and cost-effective way. Our application development experts can help you with AppDev, integration or implementation. Contact our AppDev and containerization experts today.
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