Cloud applications will be better served in the next five years

Currently, cloud computing is the darling of the IT industry, but not all applications are suitable for running on the cloud.

Experts feel the situation is changing, with most predicting that applications that are now difficult to deploy in the cloud will make better use of the cloud over the next five years.

The current application can basically be divided into two categories: vertically scalable and less compatible with the existing cloud applications, as well as the level of expansion can be well adapted to cloud applications.

Cloud-Ready Applications "are in fact a collection of lightweight services that communicate with data formats through common protocols," said Kent Langley, vice president, SolutionsSet, Digital Consulting Ltd. "Most web applications, such as webmail composing or online retailing sites, Belong to this category. "

At the same time, PeopleSoft and accounting applications such as SAP and Oracle, as well as Microsoft's SharePoint and SQL Server, are a bit cumbersome to deploy in the public cloud, depending on the underlying architecture they are in.

Indeed, sometimes it seems that vertical scaling applications look awkward in the public cloud. These applications are designed and deployed in the traditional way, relying heavily on the overall database layer. This layer should be high-performance and highly available, making it difficult to deploy on multiple servers, requiring fast, reliable connections between application layers that appear to be difficult to achieve over WAN WAN links.

"Our biggest challenge and the most energy-intensive are legacy applications," said Sean Perry, CIO at Robert Half International Inc. "We felt very excited when we used PeopleSoft (Amazon Web Services in England's data center) a few years ago. Pain because we do not often have the performance tools to use in our data centers, and we do not visualize the infrastructure deployed on them. "

Kyle Hilgendorf, principal analyst at Gartner, said that vertically scaled applications run against the cloud services provider's infrastructure, such as AWS, which serves standards such as small, medium, large and very large.

"In a traditional VMware environment, there was a slider so shutting down the virtual machines, adding virtual memory, and then powering on the VMs were all done," explains Hilgendorf. "Amazon can not do that."

Traditional business applications are just a few examples of vertically scaled applications. Jared Reimer, founder and chief engineer at Cascadeo, a cloud computing consultancy, says many custom applications are designed this way.

These applications are hard to improve for the cloud, especially when deployed for some time.

The way applications are deployed and managed also impacts the resilience of the cloud. Most on-premise applications now have no reference to the "golden image" virtual machine, with an explosion of updates as new patches and other updates arrive. When the load increases, IT may just deploy a new virtual machine, causing the virtual machine to spread.

In the cloud, automation tools such as Puppet from Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs can be used to deploy applications from scratch, making public cloud deployments more efficient and cost-effective as updates or services become corrupted, and IT staff should Consider grouping application servers in a cloud environment for load balancing, not just adding more machines.

However, not every deployment is successful with software-based load balancing provided by cloud service providers.

Ray Williamson, CTO of Best Fit Mobile, a mobile application developer, has called for a mobile application solution deployed for the art chain Michaels. During Black Friday's peak traffic, Amazon Load Balancing configured a new IP address after the new IP address until there were 22 different addresses on the load balancer connected to Best Fit's servers, with virtually no traffic reaching the backend machines.

"I think I know what happened to their software load balancer on Black Friday, and that's a lot of DNS conversion going on, so we lost," Williamson said. "The request did not reach our server."

As a result, the company turned to hardware-based load balancers, some physical clusters hosted by Rackspace, rather than continuing to use purely cloud-dependent applications.

The way to the future

In the next decade, public cloud computing still has obstacles on its way. Data leakage regulations and compliance is a matter of concern.

From a technical point of view, industry watchers say solutions to today's cloud application challenges are easy to implement.

First, some applications can be adapted to the underlying cloud architecture by being redesigned or redeployed. Sometimes, the initial deployment may cause misunderstanding, in fact, there is a difference between cloud computing and virtual data center.

"I've seen a lot of people simply migrate Exchange to the cloud," Reimer said. "It's terrible from many angles."

Reimer pointed out, however, but there are also professional services running legacy applications in the public cloud. Both Amazon and Microsoft have released a highly available design that runs a scalable SharePoint environment on AWS.

"No one looks at it all," Reimer said. "They are willing to build on their own way, and feel they get it."

Reimer said IT professionals might be better off following their data center intuition when deploying SQL Server on a Windows instance on AWS instead of using Amazon's relational database service, RDS.

In other cases, there is no need to deploy apps for the cloud, but to transform the cloud to make it suitable for use.

If AWS is not the organization's cup of tea, you can choose a professional cloud provider, who are basically focused on supporting the thorny legacy in the cloud. Virtustream, for example, hosts the largest SAP deployment in the cloud, using a unique resource allocation system based on separate CPU, RAM and disk building blocks.

"There are times when applications need not change," said Edward Haletky, CEO of Virtualization Practice. "The cloud around the application has to be specifically designed to support the applications that you want to run."

IT decision makers in some industries are already working. Community clouds ease the difficulty of centralized processing in the cloud and can customize builds to meet the unique needs of the industry. An example of this is the New York Stock Exchange Community Cloud.

Haletky said platform-as-a-service PaaS products may change the underlying scalability of legacy applications and allow them to fly free from the cloud.