The rapid rise to prominence and proliferation of cloud computing resources have created tremendous opportunities for companies of all sizes and in every industry. By embracing the cloud, firms can improve their efficiency, add new capabilities, increase flexibility and cut costs. Altogether, this makes cloud adoption an essential goal for any organization hoping to remain competitive in the coming years.

To truly benefit from the cloud and gain an edge over industry rivals, though, it’s critical for firms to embrace the cloud in the right way and with the best possible support. Key to any such effort is automation. Automation can vastly improve the cloud’s performance for a given firm, while also shoring up its data security capabilities.

Writing for Data Center Knowledge, Bill Kleyman recently highlighted several of the most important layers of data center and cloud automation that companies’ IT leaders should focus on in order to optimize their cloud deployments.

Key automation layers

One of the key automation layers that organizations should focus on, according to Kleyman, is software/applications. He pointed out that with automated tools, administrators can provision new instances of an application or new servers to host apps within the data center or cloud environment as needed, helping to ensure that resources are allocated in the optimal way.

Another important area of consideration is the virtualization and hypervisor layer, according to the writer.

“Automation and orchestration tools aim to directly integrate with the virtual layer to better control resources, virtual services delivery and the virtual workloads themselves,” Kleyman wrote.

Furthermore, he pointed out that direct plug-ins for the hypervisor platform have become a standard feature, thanks to the growing importance of automation.

One more key automation layer, as spotlighted by Kleyman, is policy control. These controls cover such diverse areas as costs and security, helping to shore up the reliability and efficiency that cloud solutions can deliver.

Getting automation right

All of this highlights the value that automation can deliver for cloud implementations. However, Kleyman also emphasized that automation will only prove its worth when it is approached and deployed effectively. Critically, he noted that automation plans need to revolve around use cases and businesses’ unique goals.

Making is happen is easier said than done. As countless firms have come to realize, developing a high-quality automation solution can be a complex task for IT teams that do not have robust cloud automation experience. That’s why it’s so valuable for organizations to partner with experienced cloud services providers, such as Datapipe, to develop and implement optimized cloud automation strategies.

In 2010 Datapipe launched the company’s managed services for AWS, transforming the managed service provider industry and defining best practices for public cloud management. Since the launch, Datapipe has been a close AWS partner, bringing public and hybrid cloud solutions and best practices to enterprises around the world.

Needless to say we are seasoned pros when it comes to AWS events like next week’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. AWS events have played a key role in advancing our AWS know-how and offerings, and connecting us with strategic partners that do the same. Below are a few things we’ve learned from past AWS events that may help you make the most of your experience next week.

Take the Time to Meet with Partners

Datapipe’s partner ecosystem, which includes partnerships with industry-leading companies like Equinix, Alert Logic and FortyCloud, is one of the strongest amongst MSPs and brings endless value to the enterprises we work with. One of the great things about AWS events is they provide an opportunity to interact face-to-face with these partners. The showroom floor also provides an opportunity to meet with potential partners and keep an eye out for companies that may be working on the “next big thing” for AWS.

Our Advice: It’s very easy to fill your days with conference keynote presentations, sessions and training. Don’t forget to take the time to meet with partners, walk the showroom floor, and network.

DevOps May be this Year’s re:Invent Buzzword

More enterprises are turning to DevOps to realize all the benefits of AWS’s rich cloud platform. Two keynotes and countless sessions at this year’s conference are dedicated to DevOps and we expect it to be a hot topic on the showroom floor as well. DevOps and automation are a key focus for Datapipe and an area that we have worked diligently to develop and make best of class. We recently acquired DualSpark, an AWS migration and assessment company with deep experience in automation and AWS DevOps. The acquisition reinforces Datapipe’s automation services and ultimately helps enterprises maximize their cloud potential and efficiency.

Our Advice: Be observant. Hints at the next big industry trend can be found at AWS events if you pay close attention to what’s going on around you. At past events, we’ve seen that those who really benefit are the ones doing their best to listen, learn, and engage.

Plan Ahead

AWS re:Invent is huge and it is very easy to get overwhelmed by all of the sessions, keynotes, trainings, side events, and opportunities on the showroom floor, especially if you don’t go in to the conference without a game plan.

Our Advice: Check out our AWS re:Invent Survival Guide for some advice on making the most of your AWS re:Invent experience. Also be sure to download and check out the AWS re:Invent app, sponsored by Datapipe. The app will let you see the agenda, search the session catalog, find maps, and more.

For those of you attending AWS re:Invent next week, Datapipe will be there in full force. Stop by the Datapipe and DualSpark booths (#220 and #724 – both right next to the AWS booth) to catch up on Datapipe’s latest happenings. We will also be presenting on a couple of interesting topics this year:

• McDonald’s Uses AWS to Launch Applications Quickly Around the glove and Engage Customers
• Building and Deploying a Modern Big Datapipe Architecture on AWS

If you are not attending this year’s conference, you can follow along remotely with Datapipe on our Twitter channel. We’ll be live tweeting a number of sessions and providing general updates from the conference and showroom floor.

There are countless ways to implement DevOps automation that can improve your company’s operations. But the hard truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to automation. Beyond understanding your process requirements, you still need to create an implementation strategy to ensure your automation plans will benefit your organization. At a minimum, your journey into DevOps automation should include the following steps:

Get buy-in from the top

No implementation can be successful without full support of the entire operations team – and beyond. Be prepared to discuss the details of your DevOps automation initiative with your team, your managers, and key decision makers in other departments. Know you goals and outline the positive impact automation will have on operations and the business as a whole. It may be important to establish some before and after metrics so keep this in mind as you develop your strategy and next steps.

Develop an implementation strategy

You won’t be able to get 100% of your operations automated in one fell swoop. While some processes are chugging along in your new DevOps systems, legacy systems and manual processes will still manage others. It’s important to have an implementation strategy in place that outlines a) the order apps will be transitioned, b) how old apps will work in parallel with new, and c) the process for transitioning apps into the new automated system.

Test, test, and test again

No matter how solid your plan of attack, you aren’t going to know what works and what doesn’t until you put it into action. It’s crucial to automate your apps from development to test – multiple times – before moving anything into full production. Going through a thorough testing process will ensure you fully understand your automation process, from what requirements need to be met and which people and groups are involved to the actual benefits delivered by the process. Be sure to leverage the tools that were used successfully as part of the testing process.

Look at the big picture

It can be easy to focus your automation implementation on your Dev and integration environments and forget about incorporating the entire delivery path. QA, Stage, Pre-PROD, and PROD need to be considered in order to achieve full automation success. It’s equally important to consider departments outside of operations and how automation will affect their business processes. If you become too laser focused in your automation strategy, you won’t be able to reap the full benefits automation can offer to your entire organization. It can also be important to quantify those benefits to build upon successful automations and further expand within the entire organization.

Enlist 3^rd party partners

To help you see the bigger picture, we recommend enlisting the help of a team outside of the existing operations and Dev teams. This can be accomplished by working with another team within your organization or by partnering with a 3^rd party vendor or service provider. In either case, a 3^rd party perspective will help you hone your strategy, ask the tough questions, and ensure your implementation process is efficient and effective.

Reassess often

Automation is not a one and done task you can check off your to do list. It is important to continually audit your existing infrastructure, identify key opportunities for new or improved automation practices, and provide ongoing support in order to continue to have the most optimized frameworks and strengthen service delivery.

Taking your company through the above steps should help your DevOps implementation stay on track and help you understand how automation will impact your business.

Enterprise IT security has traditionally been difficult, with the amount of planning, strategy, and process development that is required. Not to mention testing, reevaluating your plans, and adding additional processes as necessary. On top of that, your ability to go back and change a security implementation is limited—by what you’re operating on, by the frequency of your deployments, and by the controllability of your infrastructure. When designing on cloud environments these programs need to be able to adapt to the agility of cloud platforms like AWS.

What it boils down to is that in enterprise security, mistakes are easy to make and hard to correct – often due to a lack of visibility within the infrastructure and a low degree of automation. It may seem like an overwhelming experience, but security is perhaps the most important thing for an enterprise, and implementing security doesn’t have to introduce complexity, or add inconvenience. We’ve been partners with AWS since 2010, and we’ve seen a steady increase in the controls and tools available to help customers improve security. There are simple steps enterprises can take to ensure they’re being as secure as possible. If you’re planning on switching to an AWS environment, here are a few things to consider.

Less Is More

The old adage of “keep it simple” rings true for cloud architectures, as well. Simplicity of design, interfaces, APIs, and data flow not only lead to a secure system, it will improve scalability.

Sometimes problems are complex and require complex solutions, particularly if you’re dealing with a lot of use cases. But even in complex situations, a focus on simplicity is the key. Asking yourself “how do I keep this simple?” or “how do I keep things minimal?” while you’re designing a security implementation will go a long way.

Automating For Success

Humans make mistakes. It’s been true since the dawn of time, and will continue to occur. They’re rarely intentional, and unfortunately, even if 99.9% of what we do is accurate, do you really want to risk an entire application crashing – or perhaps, something even much worse – because of a possible 0.1% error?

This is why you should automate whenever possible. If you get the program right, it will do the security configurations correctly every single time. Test and troubleshoot often, do rapid prototyping, and implement fully automated, API-driven deployment methods.

Culture of Ownership

Companies often establish responsibility and accountability as part of implementing a security program. However, that must be paired with promoting a culture of everyone as an owner for security, which is a key step that’s often neglected. Establishing this necessity creates easier and smoother communication, and clear communications is crucial in implementing and maintaining secure environments. Make ownership of security part of the DNA of your company and the implementation of the security program.

Be Visible

Logs are your best friends within the cloud. It’s very inexpensive to keep a log within an AWS environment – if you’re not doing so, the best time to start is now, not after a crisis. If your security is visible, you can see who is accessing the resources, who took what action, when they did it, and where the breach occurred. With this information, the likelihood of success is much higher.

In addition, properly configured resources are crucial to security. If you’re able to continuously monitor the configurations of your resources, you can then evaluate the configurations for any potential security weaknesses. Again, being proactive here goes a long way. Know what’s normal in your environment. If a security issue arises, you want to be prepared.

With high visibility, agility, and controllability, you can make sure your transition is both a successful and secure one. To learn more, please visit the AWS Security Blog, and keep an eye on our Datapipe blog for additional security and AWS insights

It’s no secret that security is a concern for enterprises considering a move to the cloud. And it’s understandable–after all, you’re moving from your own data center to a new environment. Anytime you enter a new situation, it can cause trepidation. In the past, those worries were mostly unfounded, as the concern was about new technology rather than legitimate threats. Now, however, as more businesses turn to the cloud, the potential for security threats is much higher.

Don’t let that scare you, though. Cloud security shouldn’t be a roadblock to wider cloud adoption. Instead, it should be an opportunity to find the right cloud solution for you. In particular, it should stress the need for expertise in creating a secure environment within AWS.

Why is it so crucial to have an experienced partner that can assist with an AWS environment? Consider this: cloud IT infrastructure spending will reach $54.6 billion by 2019, accounting for nearly half of total spending on IT infrastructure. If there’s a mistake in your migration to the cloud, it will prove to be quite costly. Education and training can and should play a role in a cloud security effort, though training will only take you so far.

You’ll also want to automate whenever possible. Our September acquistion of DualSparkallows us to create high-scale, agile solutions with continuous monitoring to reduce latency and improve governance. And as DualSpark is an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, our customers can take advantage of everything AWS has to offer. In some cases, an organization may not even know what is available – like detailed analytics, global computation, and deployment services. The customers who partner with service providers that have “been there before” will have far fewer headaches than those who try to go it alone, or work with an inexperienced company.

One of the greatest cloud security challenges an organization can face is the need to abide by security regulations. Complicating the process even further, many countries have their own laws. Why is this an issue? Service providers frequently have multiple data centers in locations around the world. Something that’s perfectly fine in one location may be restricted in another.

What’s more, several tools and strategies that work well with traditional cybersecurity aren’t as effective in cloud environments. The people making cloud decisions within an organization have to take a good hard look at their cybersecurity capabilities. And often, this results in the development of new plans and tools specifically designed for cloud-based networks.

For enterprises in the government space, we recently were granted a Provisional FedRAMP Authority to Operate, which enables us to deliver the highest level of security and performance set by FedRAMP’s stringent compliance standards. Governance is one of the most complex aspects of cloud computing. Knowing your business and its sensitive data is working with someone that can provide private cloud and dedicated hosting environments to government agencies is quite a relief.

Business decision-makers already have a lot on their plate. If you’re interested in AWS, there’s no reason not to rely on an expert to get you optimal infrastructure. The expert partner can dive deeply into AWS—after all, this isn’t a new experience for them—and can get you the governance and security controls that are the best fit for your business. That way, you can focus on the other things your company needs, all the while knowing you have a blueprint for success within the cloud. For more information, please visit our AWS page.

Network operators may adjust their routing policy to decide how to send and receive traffic through adjacent autonomous systems. This is known as traffic engineering, and it’s used for a variety of reasons: to reduce bandwidth costs by utilizing particular paths or improving performance by using a particular transit provider that has a less-congested or lower-latency path to a destination network.

The links between these various paths and networks operate in a certain way: they scale capacity based upon observed utilization. As traffic increases, links are added within individual networks. If there’s a sudden change in utilization, these paths may experience congestion, as they’re handling a greater amount of traffic than ever before. In short, traffic engineering can be complicated.

There isn’t just one network, but many all over their world – all trying to deliver traffic and perform their own traffic-engineering. To further complicate things, some networks don’t pair with other networks at all. When this happens, the only solution is a transit provider. And even though you’ll have a path via transit, you don’t necessarily have an uncongested path at all hours of the day, particularly at peak hours.

One way to eliminate the hops between networks is via direct connections. AWS provides a service to do just this: AWS Direct Connect. With Direct Connect, customers can connect their network directly into the AWS infrastructure. This will enable bypassing network providers all together via direct physical connectivity and remove any potential Internet routing or capacity issues.

According to Amazon, this private network connection provides a safer, more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections. Particularly for enterprises that cannot use the public Internet to transfer data for fear of compliance concerns, Direct Connect is a helpful workaround. It can be used with all AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS Direct Connect is reliable, flexible, and compatible, though designing it to speak to a business’s unique needs can be a difficult and lengthy process. It includes procuring, deploying, configuring, and monitoring – all of which take valuable resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

There’s benefit to working with an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Technology and Consulting Partner, who can either assist in constructing a hybrid environment, or aid in using AWS Direct Connect by establishing network circuits between an AWS Direct Connect location and an environment in a data center. We’re one such partner and proud to have pre-provisioned ports and offer Direct Connect capabilities in all AWS regions in the United States, as well as EU (Ireland) and APAC (Singapore).

Since AWS charges for data transferred over the dedicated connection at a reduced rate, compared to the standard Internet data transfer rate, Direct Connect is a potential option for lowering costs, as well.

To use AWS Direct Connect, your network must meet one of the following three conditions:

• Your network is colocated with an existing AWS Direct Connect location.
• You are working with an AWS Direct Connect partner who is a member of the APN.
• You are working with an independent service provider to connect to AWS Direct Connect.

While the above is the first requirement to use AWS Direct Connect, your network must also meet a few other criteria—a full list can be found on the AWS Direct Connect page. For more information on partnering with an APN member, please visit our Managed Hybrid Cloud Connect page.

AWS is its own special beast–with a huge number of products and services added each month, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at all AWS’s cloud offerings. Fortunately, there are ways to proactively ensure you’re maximizing your utilization. AWS released a whitepaper a few months ago highlighting some of the best practices of using its cloud. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is based on four pillars—security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. These pillars are good refreshers to keep in mind at any stage of your AWS use.

Security

According to AWS, this is “the ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.” Within this pillar, there are a number of principles to strengthen your overall system’s security.

Rather than simply running security appliances, such as firewalls, at the edge of your infrastructure, it’s best to apply security at all layers. This includes every virtual server, load balancer and network subnet. Also be sure to log and audit all action and changes to your environment. If you can enable traceability, your security will improve.

It’s also a wise idea to look into automation. Monitor and automatically trigger responses to event-driven alerts, and create an entire infrastructure that’s defined and managed in a template. Having these security mechanisms in place will increase a business’s ability to securely scale while saving time and cost. One benefit of partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) is that it’s a lot easier to get these automated processes into place. Not only will you be able to spend more time focusing on your business goals, the more you automate, the more available resources are freed up in the long run. 

Reliability

AWS defines this as “the ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.”

More than any other, this pillar will challenge your ability to recover. In the cloud, you can test how your system fails, and can lock in your recovery procedures. Again, automation is your friend here—use it to simulate different failures, or to recreate situations that led to failures in the past. This unveils failure pathways that can be fixed before an actual failure scenario happens.

Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to trigger automation when a threshold is breached. This will automatically track and notify you of any failures. This is another way to get ahead of any failure. The last thing you want to do is react to a failure. The more proactive you can be, the better.

A common cause of failure is resource saturation. This happens when the demands placed on a system are greater than the actual capacity of that system. A MSP can monitor demand and how the system is being utilized, and automate the addition or removal of resources as needed, ensuring you’re remaining at an optimal level.

Performance Efficiency

This pillar “focuses on the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements, and maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.”

Instead of having your IT team learn how to host and run a new technology, like NoSQL databases, media transcoding and machine learning, you can have an MSP handle it. That allows you to focus on product development. And why stop within your own country? You can deploy your system around the world in a few simple clicks, providing lower latency and a better overall experience for your customers, while keeping costs down.

You can also use “server-less” architectures, which, in addition to lowering transactional costs, removes the operational burden of managing a server. For instance, storage services can act as static websites. This takes away a need for a web server, while AWS’s event services can host the code.

With these virtual and automated resources, you can be a little more experimental with your testing, taking advantage of different types of instances, storage or configurations.

Cost Optimization

The final pillar assesses “your ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded costs or suboptimal resources, and use those savings on differentiated benefits for your business. A cost-optimized system allows you to pay the lowest price possible while still achieving your business objectives and meeting, or exceeding, key requirements for the other Well-Architected pillars. You can achieve cost optimization using techniques to select the appropriate architecture, reduce unused resources, and select the most economical approach.”

Nearly every business will agree that if they could cut costs, their operation would improve. The cloud allows you to do that through a number of ways. For starters, it’s a lot easier to identify the cost of a system, helping identify return on investment. Find the areas where you’re not maximizing efficiency and address them.

The cloud also lets you shine your focus on what’s most important to your business and customers. You can work on projects while a MSP builds and powers servers, tasks your IT department would have to spend time doing otherwise. Spending money on data center operations, especially before you even know how you’ll use them, is not effective or efficient. By turning to a MSP, you’ll remove that burden from your team, and can optimize your spending.

Stopping resources when they’re not in use is another benefit of the cloud, and will keep overall costs to a minimum. Setting up an effective monitoring, reporting framework and management level visibility to identify these opportunities is key for effective cost optimization. In addition, hundreds of thousands of customers are aggregated in the AWS cloud, which translates to lower variable costs.

The benefits to using AWS cloud are many—we recommend taking a step back once in a while to ensure you’re maximizing your infrastructure. For more information, please visit our Managed Cloud for AWS page.