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Unlocking the true value and speed of innovation with a scalable cloud foundation

Written by Akhil Kohli | Jan 25, 2023 4:04:42 AM

While many companies are moving to the cloud, focusing on short-term gains will lead to long-term losses and prevent them from capturing a much larger value from cloud. This happens when the IT department, often with the help of system integrators, moves applications to the cloud as quickly as possible to reap the initial benefits. This short-term focus often has significant consequences.

Our experience of enabling many businesses across domains to move to cloud demonstrates that, organizations that establish a strong cloud foundation benefit from an many-folds in potential increase in the pace of cloud migration, adoption and modernization. We’ve been able to help them reduce migration costs by nearly ~50%, reduce complexity, enhance manageability and security.

Scalable architecture with future vision in mind – Design lays the foundation for not just short term but long-term objectives and growth of the organization. While the architecture should accommodate and address current business requirements, it should also consider company’s future growth with respect to scale, manageability, security, performance, application patterns and capabilities.

In order to achieve a scalable architecture, the solution should be built on these design principles:

Modularity – Move away from monolithic architectures to a solution consisting of smaller parts that are less complicated and easier to scale, secure, and manage. In a modular design or microservices architecture a workload or application is divided into multiple blocks / functions that integrate and communicate through APIs to achieve desired functionality of application.

Serverless or PaaS – Microservice-based modular architecture reduces the complexity of individual components or microservices. At large scale, this can cause another kind of complexity related to this number of independent components (microservices). This is where serverless or PaaS services can help reduce this complexity reliably and at scale. With this design pattern, you no longer need to manually provision, scale, maintain servers, operating systems, or runtimes to run your applications.

Reliability - The reliability of a solution depends on a number of factors, the main one being resiliency. This design principle becomes even more important at a large scale because the magnitude of the incident will generally be higher. Therefore, to achieve reliable scalability, it is essential to design a resilient architecture that ensures your workloads are available and can recover from failures at any scale. This principle involves designing the total solution so that even if one or more of its components fails, the solution can still provide the expected functionality(s) at an acceptable level.

Zero trust approach - To avoid major changes at a later stage to meet security requirements, it is essential that security be considered part of the initial architecture design. The security of complex solutions is driven by business context, social context, and technical context. For example, if the cloud project is new or small and you didn't consider security properly in the early stages, when the solution starts to scale, redesign the entire cloud project from scratch to see Considering security best practices is often not an easy choice, which can lead to the consideration of suboptimal security solutions that may affect the desired scale.

Horizontal scaling – Also known as scaling in and out, is to increase, or decrease of the number of resource instances. For a workload to work smoothly in a distributed and scalable fashion, the architecture must be designed to support the stateless extensibility model, in which application state information is stored and requested independently. with versions of the application. This makes on-demand scaling easier to achieve and manage. This principle can be supplemented by the modular design principle, where the scaling pattern can be applied to certain components or microservices of the application stack.

Coforge helps its clients make value creation a core metric by adapting its proven recipes for success. We help strengthen your cloud journey on a stronger foundation. Learn more about Coforge’ s cloud offerings here.