How Data Builds a Scalable, Resilient, and Secure Cloud Infrastructure?

“I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster. Carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.” 

– Steve Jobs, Co-founder, CEO, and Chairman, Apple Inc.

Imagine a system that can run happily on your hardware, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. An infrastructure, such as cloud infrastructure that can be developed, tested, and demonstrated on a PC running Windows, a MacBook running OSX, or a Linux system. This solution is scalable, resilient, and secure. Interesting, isn’t it?

History

In the old days, businesses and enterprises were required to buy hardware to run the components of their applications. Even a simple website, suppose WordPress, had so many components, that it required a web server of some kind (such as Apache), a way to handle PHP code, and a database. So, the enterprise would buy a server, set up Apache, PHP, and a database to run their website.

To a great extent, it worked well enough and there are still a large number of servers that are configured this way, to date. But this is not the perfect method, two of the major problems faced with this are resilience and scalability.

Resilience

Legacy systems faced a resiliency problem, meaning that there was no room for scheduled maintenance tasks without having impacts on the website and also if an issue occurred at the server, it caused the loss of service. Sometimes, the whole website would be unavailable for a long duration. Installation of routine security updates also caused a few seconds of outage for the website.

This problem was solved by the idea of building “high availability” clusters. The principle that governs the high availability was that there were two servers to run the website, configured in such a way that failure of either one would not result in the website being down.

Scalability

Let’s assume that WordPress gets one thousand visitors a month. One shiny morning, our example website was mentioned in a show and suddenly, it got a months’ worth of visitors in less than thirty minutes. Boom! Yeah, that’s what we call a website crash. The reason for this? Lack of scalability.

The solution for resiliency could manage a higher workload than one server alone, but it is still limited. The company had to pay for two servers and, both the servers worked properly. Most of the time, one server was enough to run the site but during peak loads, it required ten servers to handle the traffic, which lasted for only a few hours. The company realized that it is costing them a fortune only to handle a boost that happens once in a blue moon.

What’s the Solution?

For both problems, cloud computing is a better solution. Simply set up a server instance or two – little servers that run your applications on AWS or Google Cloud, and if one of the instances failed for whatever reason, it would automatically restart. The auto-scaling feature would be helpful to manage unpredicted loads by starting new instances with the rise in traffic and when the interest dies down, additional instances would automatically be stopped. You pay only for what you use. Wow! Isn’t it perfect? Or not?

With the flexibility of the cloud, there came some other issues. Updating all the running instances became important. Development for the cloud has its challenges too. It is easy to migrate your cloud infrastructure to any of the public cloud infrastructure or providers, but for whatever reason, you would want to reconsider handing over all your computing to AWS, Google, or Microsoft.

Containerization

Above we discussed a simple WordPress site, now what would you do if you need a system for a big data ecosystem, or you have a really big application? Today’s solution is much smarter. You may have heard of containers, micro-services, and the name Docker. You might have also heard of Kubernetes. These are changing the face of big application computing nowadays.

Each component of your application runs in a container. A container is a self-contained, minimal software box that runs just that one component. Very smart orchestration software is kept in place to manage the containers. This is where Docker and Kubernetes come into play.

Docker is a mechanism that enables containers to run by themselves. Docker can run anywhere, i.e., on your own hardware, on AWS, on Google Cloud, or on your developer’s laptop. Consider your developer is running OSX, you are running Windows on your office system, and your production system is running Linux; it is totally fine. You can run Docker and thus, the containers on any or all of these machines.       

Kubernetes manages the Docker instances. Using your specified criteria, Kubernetes ensures that enough instances are running. It also manages networking and security between the instances. It shares the workload among the underlying servers, be it a cloud instance or your own hardware.  Kubernetes manages both ephemeral and persistent storage and much more. There is a long list of what Kubernetes and Docker can do for you.

Kubernetes is intended to run versatile, flexible, and, if necessary, complex applications, and has built-in features to make life simpler. For instance, it bolsters namespaces, permitting a similar application code to be deployed multiple times. You may have a Production namespace, a Development namespace, and a User Acceptance Testing namespace – or you may have one namespace per git branch. Kubernetes can fit in with your deployment and arrangement work process, coordinating with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) frameworks.

Kubernetes isn’t only for ‘the huge applications’. You can run a Kubernetes framework anyplace. Run it on your laptop as proof of concept. When you are used to it, relocate it to a server. This gives you a chance to investigate it further. When you have a single point of failure in that server, relocate it to Google Cloud, to Amazon Web Services, or on the other hand, to whichever cloud infrastructure supplier you like. What’s more, in the event that you need to, you can fabricate your very own equipment framework in-house and run it there.

Conclusion

To deal with a huge amount of data or to run your company’s website, without giving away your computing to somebody else, you can achieve a resilient, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes and Docker. Kubernetes is born of a Google project, GIFEE (Google’s Infrastructure for Everyone Else). Google has been massively successful in running distributed applications across a significant amount of servers in a well-coordinated and secured way whenever it wants. And now, you can too. 

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Good luck and happy learning