The Dynamic Cloud Helps Your Website Work When Customers Need It Most
Imagine you and your friends have been eagerly anticipating the season premiere of your favorite HBO show all year long. You decide to throw a viewing party, excited to show off your brand new 75-inch 4K super deluxe TV. The drinks are cold, the snacks are all set out, and everyone is excited. The show is just about to start, when suddenly your internet connection goes down and all that enormous new TV screen displays is one big, high-definition error message.
This was the last thing you expected, and your special night is ruined. Upset, you call your ISP and ask, “What the heck happened?” The person on the other end is apologetic but points out that you’ve had service “most of the time.” Of course, “most of the time” doesn’t help. It was today, the day of your viewing party, that you cared about. Being up “most of the time” wasn’t helpful at all.
“Most of the time” isn’t good enough
Now, imagine that instead of not being able to watch your show, we’re talking about a retailer’s website having problems on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Once again, you may not get much sympathy from your hosting and third-party service providers. Just like with your ISP, your application worked most of the time, so what are you complaining about? It was just down for one day—just too bad it was your biggest day.
Of course, you’re complaining because customers don’t care if your application works most of the time. They care whether it works when they need it to work. Your business cares that it works on your biggest days. That’s what availability is all about. That’s what scaling is all about.
So, how do you achieve that kind of availability and scalability? The kind that allows your applications to work not just most of the time, but when they really need to, such as on your organization’s biggest, most important days. When traffic is at its peak. When load is at maximum.
The answer is to leverage the dynamic cloud.
Availability and scalability
There are two main ways that modern enterprise applications use the cloud. There’s the “better data center” approach to using the cloud, and then there’s using the cloud in a more dynamic fashion.
The “better data center” approach is when the resources within your application, such as servers or databases, are allocated to specific uses just like they are in your data center. You create servers, you assign them to applications, and those applications are relatively permanent and static assignments. This is the model that’s typically used by “lift and shift” migrations.
Of course, provisioning those servers is faster in the cloud, but the lifetime of the resources and the components that you create is relatively long, typically measured in weeks, months, or years. In this kind of environment, traditional capacity planning is still important. You need to estimate your traffic for any given day, and make sure you have the capacity in place to handle it. You still have to do traditional capacity planning in order to keep your application working at whatever scale is necessary to handle your biggest day—whatever that day is.
This model does make it easier to add capacity, and you can build in redundancy, which gives you higher availability and may help achieve compliance. But it doesn’t really help you with scaling, with capacity planning, or with availability on your biggest days. When traffic spikes suddenly—and potentially unexpectedly—this mostly static model doesn’t help at all. That’s where the dynamic cloud comes in.
The dynamic cloud
The dynamic cloud is characterized by applications that use only the resources they need at that given moment in time. These applications dynamically allocate and de-allocate the resources on the fly, and the allocation and de-allocation of those resources is an integral part of the application architecture. Resources are allocated, they’re consumed, then they’re de-allocated, all under the control of the application and the application environment.
The dynamic cloud makes it faster and easier to build applications that can scale as needed. Container and serverless technologies such as Docker, Amazon EC2, and AWS Lambda are great examples of dynamic cloud technologies. Lambda functions, for example, are a highly scalable way of processing data, in which the compute function is allocated on demand from a common pool of resources, and you don’t have to worry about it. That kind of freedom is what the dynamic cloud is all about.
The dynamic cloud also lets you build applications faster and make and deploy changes faster. The dynamic cloud makes it easy to launch an application using a new set of resources and terminate the previously used resources when it’s done. Using the dynamic cloud, you can very easily create staging environments and development environments, all of which can help you build applications faster and result in higher availability for your applications.
Monitoring the dynamic cloud
But how do you monitor a dynamic application? How do you monitor resources that come into existence one minute and then disappear the next?
It turns out that monitoring the dynamic cloud is very different than monitoring a traditional static application. You still have to monitor the individual static cloud components, just like you do with a regular application, but you also have to track the lifecycle of the components and the resources being used. Because to diagnose problems, it’s not enough to know that a resource ran; you also need data on when it ran. Knowing which resources were being used when the problem occurred is critical.
A new world of ops
The world of operations used to be relatively well contained and well controlled. Operations teams managed racks of servers, and those servers had serial numbers—heck, sometimes even names! If you kept spreadsheets listing your servers, you knew exactly what applications and software were running on each one. It was someone’s job to manage all that, and they controlled that data like it was golden.
That’s not the way the ops world works anymore. Your applications run on dynamic resources that continually come and go in such a way that you can no longer track everything on spreadsheets. The exact names and available resources are no longer relevant.
That’s a big change, and it can be disconcerting to many operations veterans. But there’s a big payoff: greater growth in applications and more scalability within applications to help ensure availability on your biggest days, not just most of the time. That’s the promise of the dynamic cloud.
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