Hybrid Clouds for Legacy Applications: Maintaining Integration Across Multiple Environments

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1 Hybrid Clouds for Legacy Applications: Maintaining Integration Across Multiple Environments logicworks logicworks.net FOR LOGIC

2 ! Executive Summary The cloud is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Many IT leaders plan to migrate the majority of on-premises infrastructure to IaaS platforms like Amazon Web Services, but will maintain a period in which hybrid infrastructure allows IT leaders to take advantages of existing legacy systems while preparing applications and the teams that manage them for the cloud. An organization s success during this hybrid period depends on the technology and processes that integrate multiple components and facilitate future migrations to the cloud.! Hosting Legacy Applications Enterprises frequently maintain hundreds or even thousands of legacy applications. Despite the well-known benefits of public cloud deployments, there is often good reason to maintain some applications or application tiers in on-premise datacenters or in a managed private hosting environment. Complex system components with multi-year licenses and sunk infrastructure costs, like most enterprise database systems, are rarely first in line for migration. Maintaining these components in corporate datacenters or in a managed private cloud is often the most cost-effective short- to mid-term solution. Meanwhile, the web or application tier can be hosted in a public cloud to take advantage of the savings and agility of the cloud logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 2!

3 To optimize the performance of legacy applications on hybrid environment and facilitate future migrations, the following conditions should be met: There should be low-latency connections between private/onpremises and the public cloud. This is usually quite simple to set up but is also dependent on the location of the corporate datacenter in relation to your AWS region. A single, consolidated monitoring interface/dashboard should exist across multiple environments. The team(s) managing multiple environments must integrate such that their overall goal is the maintenance and health of the application, not simply their piece of the infrastructure. This is the first step in the creation of autonomous, service-oriented DevOps teams and ensures that cloud knowledge is shared throughout the organization. In such cases, a hybrid deployment delivers the cost-effectiveness and availability of the public cloud while maintaining legacy applications in customized, high-performance environment all under the monitoring and management of an application-focused team with tools to quickly identify and resolve issues across the entire system. The experience of such a team will also prove invaluable in the case of future migrations to the public cloud. It is important to note that though cloud and on-premises infrastructure is integrated, the ability to seamlessly move applications between onpremises and the cloud is largely a myth. In truth, applications will almost always require partial quality or scalability remediation. Hybrid hosting facilitates migration to the cloud only in that it ensures the team itself has experience in both traditional and cloud infrastructure and therefore a deep level of familiarity with the application logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 3!

4 ! Case Study: Oracle RAC Oracle RAC is a shared cache clustered database architecture that is a good example of the kind of system that was built for bare metal hosting and presents a complex migration challenge. RAC utilizes Oracle Grid Infrastructure to enable the sharing of server and storage resources in a highly available and scalable environment. While Amazon has a robust suite of tools and resource to help enterprises achieve high availability database systems, AWS has not developed shared block storage, so neither Amazon s EC2 nor Relational Database Service (RDS) provide native support for RAC. Enterprises often mistakenly assume that RAC makes AWS off-limits; in fact, this is a good use-case for a hybrid deployment. The best option is to maintain Oracle RAC on bare metal servers in a colocation/private cloud facility with low-latency connections to web/app tiers in AWS. Connections can also be maintained between the private cloud environment, AWS, and corporate datacenters. In fact, in many ways this hybrid cloud configuration gives enterprises the!best of both Oracle and AWS. This is what such a configuration might look like (in this case, on Logicworks cloud): 2015 logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 4!

5 Note two key features of this environment: 1. The location of the datacenter hosting Oracle RAC. Depending on the AWS region employed for the deployment, maintaining RAC in a facility as close as possible to the AWS datacenter creates a latency of between 1 to 2 milliseconds. 2. AWS Direct Connect. A native AWS resource that provides a redundant, dedicated, private connection between the Production AWS environment and the Oracle RAC hosting environment, and between AWS and the client data center. Direct Connect reduces network costs, increases bandwidth throughput, and provides a consistent network experience. This dedicated connection to AWS can be utilized to perform backups consistent with the enterprise s data retention and recovery requirements. Amazon has not hinted that Oracle RAC or shared storage will be supported in the future. While it has a fleet of enterprise-grade database resources, a hybrid cloud solution that maintains RAC is an excellent compromise that provides high performance and availability. From this point, it is fairly simple to implement additional integrations, such as backups from the Oracle RAC environment that can be pushed to AWS s S3 and Glacier, etc. Hybrid Monitoring/Dashboards Enterprises no doubt already have sophisticated tools in place to monitor both cloud and on-premise environments. Uniting these tools into a single dashboard across private, public, or on-premises environments for single applications or teams may present an additional challenge, but is a crucial component of the successful management of the environment logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 5!

6 In addition to alerting and alarm functions, the dashboard maintains a single source of truth if something does not go as planned and frequently improves or eliminates finger-pointing. It gives both internal and external teams access to the same data set to make informed decisions and respond to failure. Often third party security and monitoring tools like EM7 or Alert Logic are employed, each of which provide tools for both private and public cloud deployments. These portals offer a comprehensive view into the operating environment and can be customized to monitor specific metrics relevant to the heath of the environment or integrated with third party application-level monitoring to provide more granular insight into the health of the environment. In fact, anything that can be used as a health indicator (database transaction capabilities, etc.) can be reported and alerted on as a health metric. In most cases, this single pane of glass over the entirety of an enterprise environment is possible or useful only if a single team manages both, whether that is a highly functional, vertically-integrated internal team or a managed service provider. Hybrid Teams IT leaders frequently find that transitioning IT staff to a cloud-based service delivery model is more challenging than transitioning the infrastructure itself. A collaborative, vertically-oriented IT organizational structure is crucial to the success of any cloud infrastructure, yet a highly functional IT structure is more difficult to achieve when the enterprise has a mix of public, private, and on-premises environments. In order to gain visibility across all environments and monitor, optimize, and audit all tiers of hundreds of applications, hybrid cloud environments must be managed by high-performing cross-functional teams with a clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Unfortunately, seventy-nine (79%) believe they need better visibility across on-premises and cloud-based environments, according to a recent study logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 6!

7 The progress of implementing the latest deployment and integration best practices is often slow, and in a large enterprise can take many years. It is a significant challenge to find staff that understands the challenges of both traditional IT and the latest cloud computing technologies and can implement and monitor security and deployment strategy across both. This is why enterprises usually hire a managed service provider (MSP) with experience in traditional hosting and cloud computing best practices, who can not only consult on both legacy and cloud technology but can host applications in both. This allows enterprises to maintain a single relationship, a single contract, SOW and SLA, and a single throat to choke. This level of organizational simplicity makes it possible to move applications between public/private clouds with the same vendor. This dramatically reduces organizational friction by reusing a team that has already integrated with the internal team. This integration often extends far beyond infrastructure support, and will often include documenting the enterprise s deployment processes and recommending the use of tools like Jenkins and Puppet to allow developers, internal cloud engineers, and the MSP to work together more seamlessly. A cloud MSP with traditional IT knowledge can often communicate more effectively with your internal IT teams in translating cloud resources, which makes it possible for the MSP to coach and educate the internal team about cloud best practices. In this way, the MSP s engineers function as DevOps implementers and internal changemakers, gradually disseminating more agile processes throughout the organization. Summary Enterprise teams across the country are in transition to a cloud-based service delivery system, and IT leaders must determine the best strategy for maintaining legacy systems while enabling innovation. This usually evolves as the organization becomes more confident in cloud deployments, and can be facilitated by service-oriented team structure and external cloud experts logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 7!

8 About Us!Logicworks provides cloud computing and managed hosting to some of the world s most respected brands including Dow Jones, NBC, Lincoln Center, Orion Health, and Flowers.com. Logicworks specializes!in Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud Solutions for SaaS, Media, ecommerce, Mobile, Healthcare, and Financial services companies. Logicworks al offers a full suite of Managed Database Services, including Oracle RAC with low-latency connections to our managed AWS solutions. Visit us a to learn more. 1!Algosec,!Security Policy Management in Hybrid Cloud Environments 2014, ments_2014! 2015 logicworks content@logicworks.net logicworks.net FOR LOGIC 8!