Companies today operate in a competitive market that evolves rapidly. In this context, it is necessary to innovate faster, drawing knowledge from data and interacting with customers, partners, and employees quickly and intuitively. To face all these changes, a catalyst is needed: the Cloud. The motivations that drive business towards this technology, if until recently they were little understood, have become clear to everyone. The advantages of moving to the Cloud are many, but we can summarize them in four main points:
- better collaboration and process agility: thanks to the faster and easier sharing of data and applications between colleagues, even at a distance
- Greater efficiency: because figures previously involved in infrastructure maintenance are relocated to activities with greater added value
- Greater security: the data is encrypted and is located in various data centers located in super-controlled locations, secured by specialized companies
- flexible pricing: based on zero lock-in policies and savings on the purchase, installation, maintenance, and disposal of hardware and software
Google Cloud is undoubtedly the most performing and convenient of all the services the market offers. This platform’s choice and an expert partner’s guidance in creating your infrastructure make a difference in corporate cloud transformation.
Why Rely On The Cloud Native Method?
It is an approach that considers all aspects of the project specifically oriented toward using the Cloud. In particular, it allows you to obtain various useful, if not fundamental, characteristics, such as:
- Upgradability: to always remain current and accessible
- Elasticity: to employ more resources during a peak of use
- Multitenancy: to work in a virtual space and share resources with other apps
- Reliability – to manage highly available applications
- Modular design – for dividing functions into microservices
It is a modernization of the company’s infrastructural and application profiles based on the Google Cloud Platform through a logical, structured path to understand and satisfy every customer need.
Keyword: DevOps
Google and other major software providers realized that, with traditional development methodologies, large applications could no longer operate efficiently or evolve. As a result, the way these solutions are designed, built, and distributed has completely changed in just a few years. The result is a system that breaks down the traditional separation between the development path (Dev) and the operation (Ops) path in implementing applications.
With this in mind, developers must consider all the potential problems that the people who run the application in the operation area will have to face, but also vice versa, taking into account the entire life cycle of the product. About the Cloud, this method materializes and takes on meaning in two directions. First, the Google Cloud Platform offers services expressly dedicated to DevOps.
More importantly, this technique is much easier and more effective when working in a cloud environment. The DevOps system then contains other elements that increase its value. It allows, for example, CI and CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), i.e., work paths that allow continuous application management, integration, evolution, and distribution.
Containerization
Another fundamental aspect is that of containerization. This is the creation of a structure capable of executing and isolating the execution of programs and applications in individual containers that communicate with each other through systems such as Google Kubernetes or Anthos. In this way, when there is the need to modify the application, it becomes much easier to intervene only on the identified container, leaving all the other operational components.
At the basis of this method is a Microservices architecture, a solution that has become indispensable for developing large cloud applications that must evolve and scale quickly. Their software structure is divided into many small independent components, each with its function. It will therefore be possible to work more effectively on each object without affecting the functioning of the application as a whole.
The 5 Phases Of The Journey
The Cloud Native approach stems from decades of experience supporting companies in cloud transformation and custom software development. The best practices refined over time have materialized in a structured path, which includes the following 5 fundamental steps:
Discovery
A listening phase aims to understand the objectives and all the business needs. It also analyzes the state of the art of the hardware and software situation of the companies and their macro organization in managing the same. In this way, it will be possible to devise a project that is truly the perfect answer to business needs, identifying characteristics and specific requests.
GCP Foundation
This step introduces the customer to the basics of the Google Cloud Platform from a management and operational point of view. The aspects of practical and economic management of the service are therefore examined, such as the project setup, the allocation of resources, access permissions, and process monitoring.
Architectural
At this point, the first version of the application’s cloud architecture is created with the customer, with which the project components, GCP services, are involved in the project, and other aspects such as organization, networking, resources, monitoring, security, and security compliance are defined in detail.
Training
To put the customer in a position to make the most of the application, specialist training courses are envisaged and focused on the services identified in the Architecture phase. Depending on the design needs, the topics to be learned may concern infrastructure, code management, tool integration, data analysis, or machine learning.
Implementation
Finally, we move on to effective implementation and subsequent maintenance, which can be carried out by the customer independently. In this phase, it is possible to use consultancy services or technical support or rely on full outsourcing of analysis, design, maintenance, or IT operations management. Creating Proofs of Concept, technical tests, cost estimates, and other application performance evaluation tools will also be possible.
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