In cloud you do things cloud’s way

In cloud you do things cloud’s way

Lately Amazon, AWS approached us to do a proof-of-concept (POC) on their cloud platform to validate if it is good enough to host an enterprise applications. And I am delighted that this POC on Amazon, AWS has scraped many of our if and but’s about cloud.

To brief about POC, we chose ResutSpace3 as an application to be tested on AWS. And the selection of RS3 was simply for the reason, that we (ISST) hold good experience around its architecture, functionality and infrastructure. In addition, the enterprise class multi-tier architecture with stringent non-functional requirements such as high availability, performance, DR, etc. made it a super fit.

Some of the highlights and our experience about AWS

1. The architecture portability from the way it’s currently implemented in Physical infrastructure to cloud infrastructure was easy and smooth. Almost all dedicated components such as Firewall, LB were easily replaced by virtualised components on AWS platform except storage, where we need do some tweaking
2. In less than weeks’ time, entire public infrastructure was up and running. [Important to mention that we had implemented a primary site (US) and DR site (Singapore) on public cloud]
3. The results of all these tests we ran were equally good, and at instance even better. However we couldn’t run comparative performance tests, because testing on live wasn’t allowed for comparisons.
4. And this entire 5 week of POC was done with-in the credit of USD 500 provided by Amazon excluding our efforts.

This implementation has invalidated many of our assumptions that cloud is not feasible for complex architecture implementations. For e.g.
1. Concept of storage or shared storage required to implement a cluster be it a web, application or DB cluster.
2. Storage requirement of single volumes or multiple volumes (in terabytes)
3. Online backups and restore
4. Security controls, logical segmentation of devices etc.

And, finally the important lesson we learned, in cloud you do things cloud way. Architecture on cloud is something needs to be drawn from scratch and not to do a pure one to one mapping.

At times during implementation we felt that there are caveats in cloud, but then we got the answers and ways to resolve it. Our whitepaper is yet to be published by AWS, but this whole activity has given us lots of confidence and knowledge of cloud.

Manpreet