Infrastructure Management

Advantages of Microsoft Azure

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:25:09 +0000

Advantages of Microsoft Azure admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:25

Step 1: Azure vs. on-premises

At ITQSOFT , we define three major aspects inducing companies to migrate to the cloud:

High maintenance costs.
Risks arising from hardware failures.
Growing bandwidth demands.

And Azure successfully meets those challenges by providing:

On-the-go scalability of your IT environment with no need to run a data center with dedicated IT staff.
Timely backups for your virtual machines and data.
Fast data transfer and low latencies thanks to a globally spread Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN).

However good the benefits of an entire-cloud environment are, some companies opt for a hybrid cloud strategy to get additional scalability and functionality from a cloud but to retain the lowest latencies for the most critical internal processes. And Microsoft Azure specifically supports such infrastructures with related services:

Azure Active Directory. An identity and access management service synchronizing your cloud and on-premises assets.
Azure ExpressRoute. The service for broadband private on-premises – cloud communication.
Azure Stack. It allows running Azure services locally in your own data center.
Azure DevOps. Services facilitating the implementation of CI/CD pipelines in a hybrid environment.

Step 2: Azure vs. IaaS-only cloud platform

If computing and storage resources are all you require from a cloud to scale your application on the fly, you can consider choosing an IaaS-only cloud vendor. However, I recommend you to give a thought to off-the-shelf PaaS services when planning cloud migration. Thus, Azure provides numerous PaaS services, which enable you to build, test, deploy, manage, and update cloud apps. You are likely to opt for them if the following statements pertain to you:

You want to save time and money on developing and deploying your cloud app.
You want to transform your monolithic app into a flexible failsafe mesh of interrelated services to cut down on modernization and maintenance costs.

Step 3: Azure vs. AWS

Now it’s time to benchmark Azure against its major competitor – AWS. At ITQSOFT , I work with both providers and know the pros and cons of each to remain unbiased while comparing them. Here are the advantages of Azure over AWS obvious in my daily practice:

Per-minute pricing (if the time billing for services takes place) as opposed to a rounded-up hourly pricing model of AWS.
An array of free useful services included in the Azure subscription. Some are unconditionally free (Azure Kubernetes Service, Security Center, Machine Learning Server, etc.), others have limitations for free usage (Azure DevOps (up to 5 users), App Service (up to 10 apps), etc.)
Cost savings if you already use Microsoft products locally. You can lift and shift your Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server instances in Azure as is without the need to renew licenses. Also, you get free security updates and native maintenance of back-end firmware.
Hybrid cloud support. You can run Azure services locally for latency and data security matters and augment them with cloud resources to scale up.

Considering the above, I would recommend Microsoft Azure to:

A small business or a startup to get vast capabilities at a low price once it gets an Azure subscription.

Companies running own data centers where Azure may constitute a kernel for their hybrid infrastructure and aid their complete migration once such a need occurs.

Want to Leverage Azure’s Benefits?

ITQSOFT`s professionals will apply their 8+ years of experience with Azure to reduce your cloud migration costs and monthly cloud costs.

Reasons for non-IT companies to fall for Azure

For a non-IT business lacking cloud-related knowledge and dedicated IT staff, Azure’s out-of-the-box PaaS and SaaS components will be a tangible benefit as they help:

Reduce migration and maintenance costs. You can leverage the Azure components to reproduce your on-premises apps of any complexity with little development efforts and get the architecture open for improvements.
Achieve high scalability and performance of your Azure-deployed apps. Azure features autoscaling and high-performance computing (Azure HPC) technologies to easily scale, increase the performance, and reduce resource consumption of your apps.

Azure’s value for SaaS and XaaS providers

Azure’s capabilities can completely satisfy the needs of SaaS and XaaS companies pursuing fast market entry and efficient content delivery by:

Global coverage and high availability. You gain access not only to Azure CDN but to the CDNs of Microsoft’s partners like Akamai and Verizon, which ensures low network and web latency for your users.
Minimized development costs and time. You can quickly set up a robust DevOps environment and CI/CD pipeline streamlining your development process and use ready-to-go services to compose your product instead of writing code.

High integration capabilities. Azure services seamlessly integrate with other Microsoft services (e.g., ones included in Microsoft 365 and Power Platform) and open-source data processing techs (for example, Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop data analytics engines).
Highly secured data. Azure provides for immense compliance with industry standards for secure data storage and processing, including HIPAA.

Azure offers a vast array of services assisting in lift-and-shift migration. Still, sometimes a complete reimplementation of your app in the cloud will be preferable to gain increased stability and advanced functionality. See how we re-implemented our customer’s accounting business SaaS solution in Azure to step up its capabilities.

Leverage Azure’s benefits to the full

I hope you got a well-ordered understanding of the benefits you may get from Microsoft Azure as the list of its pros is really immense. Let’s sum up the essentials:

Variety of services and technologies to leverage.
Good support of hybrid infrastructures.
Global content delivery network.
High integration capabilities.

However, you should have enough competence in Azure to make your cloud migration efficient and cost-effective. Otherwise, I recommend you to entrust the entire process to a competent cloud migration service provider, who will ensure your fast migration with reduced cloud consumption costs. Being such, ITQSOFT`steam is always ready to help, just give us a call.

Infrastructure Management

Network Operations Center

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:25:01 +0000

Network Operations Center admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:25

Below, I share the top 4 best practices that may help you effectively organize and manage the work of your Network Operations Center.

1. Clearly define the NOC team’s responsibilities

Ineffective division of roles and duties among NOC team members cause disjointed work of the whole network operations center. Typically, there are two roles in a NOC team structure: NOC engineers and NOC managers. A NOC engineer’s responsibilities include continuous network monitoring, troubleshooting, resolution and escalation of issues related to the network, interaction with customers, documentation and creating reports. A NOC manager, in turn, is in charge of prioritizing and assigning tasks to engineers based on their skills and expertise, making sure staff is informed about significant IT infrastructure incidents, as well as overseeing the high-level NOC functioning.

2. Encourage collaboration among NOC team members

Well-coordinated teamwork of your NOC team members is a key to the effective and quick resolution of emerging issues. Today, the market offers a number of powerful online collaboration tools with such capabilities as the automation of incident management and the escalation process, collaboration on documents, reporting, and analytics for NOC managers and departments concerned.

Do NOC Management and Operation Seem a Burden?

ITQSOFT is ready to establish and/or manage your NOC for you to reduce operational costs and free up technical staff.

3. Create a knowledge base for NOC engineers

Document all the incidents to make a centralized source of information for your NOC staff. The knowledge base should be accessible to all your team members and contain structured information about the previously resolved issues, featuring the most common ones. It will help your NOC engineers quickly and more efficiently resolve incidents relying on the documented experience.

4. Continuously monitor NOC performance

Reports should be created on a daily basis and contain the information about all the major incidents of the past 24 hours, the number of successfully resolved incidents, time-to-response, time-to-resolution, the number of incidents resolved before escalation, and other KPIs. All the resolved issues should have the root causes listed.

Enable smooth network operations

Properly managed network operations back up the uninterrupted work of your organization’s IT infrastructure. Applying the practices I described above will help you run your network operations more efficiently and increase network uptime. If you consider outsourcing your NOC to a reliable service provider to reduce your expenses and stay focused on business projects, feel free to contact my team.

Infrastructure Management

How Can a System Administrator Turn Into a DevOps Engineer

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:24:21 +0000

How Can a System Administrator Turn Into a DevOps Engineer admin Mon, 12/21/2020 - 05:24

It’s not a surprise that most DevOps engineers come from the system administration. For system administrators, such a career maneuver allows improving their professional qualifications without moving directly to the development area. Whether this opportunity excites your curiosity or not, in this article, we’ll explain why it should and will shed light on the way how to become a DevOps engineer.

DevOps as a concept

A while ago, Agile transformed software development processes. Now the time has come for DevOps to influence the IT industry. Large enterprises like Amazon and Facebook were the first to switch to DevOps. Today, the DevOps approach is implemented both in IT and non-IT companies worldwide. It helps IT teams to adapt to modern tendencies, such as IT infrastructure sophistication, the increase of software updates frequency and respond more rapidly to user feedback.

Despite DevOps popularity, there is still no common definition of the term. Typically, DevOps is described as a modern approach to software development where development and operations specialists are united in one big team. To be more specific, the DevOps approach implies that the development, quality assurance (QA), design, analytics, operations, and other specialists are put in one working environment where they constantly collaborate through the entire development-testing-releasing cycle and work using unified tools. All members of the newly created DevOps team share the responsibility for all processes within a software life cycle – from gathering requirements specifications to delivering the application into production and further monitoring its performance and reliability.

Let’s imagine a software development company that is creating an online booking service. In the pre-DevOps times, a development team wrote a new piece of code quarterly to update the existing software functionality. Before getting to production, software passed from developers to software test engineers, and then – to system administrators. In case errors occurred in the application’s functioning at this stage, the development team got the defect tickets to fix bugs in released software. As a rule, they needed to spend too much time to identify “defective” code fragments and put them to rights.

Once the bugs were fixed, software test engineers got the adjusted application to verify the fixes in it. After that, the operations team took up the torch and did their best to put modified software into production avoiding failures and providing software users with a stable application. However, there was always a risk that the adjusted application would behave differently when the operations specialists moved it from the testing environment to production.

Thus, such a software development approach implied a continuous process of transferring an application from one department to another, which resulted in the prolongation of the development-testing-releasing cycle.

To accelerate software development and increase the quality of application releases, the company decided to switch to DevOps. They moved away from a clear division of duties, when developers, test engineers, and system administrators were responsible only for their part of work with just a general idea of the other team members’ responsibilities. The development and operations teams have become involved in the software release process in equal measure.

Due to the shift to DevOps, the working process for the developers and the operations team becomes interdependent and runs more efficiently: the Ops team assists the Dev team in managing and maintaining large-scale information systems (e.g., data warehouses, enterprise planning systems), and the Dev team, in its turn, helps the Ops team to configure the IT infrastructure, as well as implement software updates to improve its security, reliability and performance. Thus, the amount of time needed for the development cycle decreases.

DevOps practices

DevOps is not only about establishing a new pattern of relationships across the IT department, it also entails applying new development practices.

Continuous Integration implies that developers daily put their part of complete code to a master repository in a version control system. When a developer makes changes to code, a shared code repository is updated automatically. Here, all the source code files are compiled together and the build artifacts (such as executable programs) are created. The normal practice is to organize builds regularly, for instance, once or twice a day. In terms of each build, unit testing and automated tests are conducted to check the application performance. If errors occur, developers are immediately notified and can fix them promptly.
Continuous Delivery comes after continuous integration. Once the application is built, unit tests and application acceptance tests, are conducted automatically, the DevOps team manually delivers software to the client’s servers.
Continuous Deployment implies that once the changes are applied to software and the updated application undergoes the required automated and manual tests, software is automatically released into production.

DevOps as a profession

When the company’s management decides to shift to DevOps, the need arises to train IT department specialists to master certain practices and use new tools. In this case, either developers or system administrators need to assume new job responsibilities. A better alternative may be hiring a professional with a clear understanding of the DevOps approach and an ability to set all the necessary processes properly. Thus, an IT department needs a specialist with a combination of system administration and programming skills, i.e., a DevOps engineer. According to Neuvoo, DevOps engineers’ average salary in the US is twice as high as that of a system administrator. The reason is quite simple — a competent DevOps engineer can greatly increase the efficiency of software development and operations.

After getting software requirements specifications, a DevOps engineer starts setting up the IT infrastructure required for the development. When the IT infrastructure is ready and provided to developers, testers, and other specialists involved in the development cycle, a DevOps engineer ensures that the development and testing environments are aligned with the production environment. If you ask the DevOps engineer what exactly they do, the answer will likely mention “automation.” What they actually mean is the following:

Automating software delivery from the testing environment to the production.
Managing physical and virtual servers and their configurations.
Monitoring the IT infrastructure’s state and the application’s behavior.

One of the key duties of a DevOps engineer is to set platforms and tools to implement the continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of code. To automate software deployment on servers, they use such integration tools as Jenkins, TeamCity, GoCD, or Bamboo.

Before the rise of the DevOps concept, system administrators had to set and configure each server manually. Today, due to the implementation of the infrastructure as code (IaC) approach, a DevOps engineer can easily manage the entire IT infrastructure. All scripts for server setting, as well as code written by developers, are stored in version control systems. The operation of servers can be coordinated remotely with such tools as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or Kubernetes.

Things to know to become a DevOps engineer

To start a career as a DevOps engineer, you’ll need to complete your system administration background with the DevOps-specific skills.

Linux and/or Windows administration

The administration of Linux and/or Windows OS is among the primary skills employers expect from their potential DevOps engineers. To improve your system administration skills, you can enroll in the relevant Linux administration courses, or pass Windows Server Administration training from Microsoft.

Programming skills

A DevOps engineer needs to know programming languages used for configuration automation, for example, Bash, PowerShell, Python, or Ruby. To become more qualified, you can learn one of the general-purpose programming languages, for instance, Go (also known as Golang). You can apply this bundle of knowledge in scripting data processing, creating Kubernetes Operators, AWS Lambdas, etc.

Cloud management skills

Amazon Web Services is among the most popular cloud platforms. A DevOps engineer generally works with such AWS services as AWS OpsWorks, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeStar, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. If you are not familiar with AWS, you can use the opportunity to get one-year free access to a range of the company’s products by registering at their official website. Specialized training can provide you with a better understanding of the platform tools.

Azure DevOps is another well-known and widely used cloud platform. A set of DevOps services Microsoft offers to try for free allows DevOps engineers to monitor software performance and set up automated pipelines to build, test and deploy code easily, thus significantly simplifying software projects management.

Practical experience with containers and orchestration

Containers allow for deploying applications independently from the host OS. Compared to virtual machines (VMs) used in the pre-DevOps times, containers are more lightweight and quicker to launch. Docker represents the most widely known platform that allows working with containers. Developers and DevOps engineers can use Docker containers simultaneously – while a developer writes code, a DevOps engineer creates configuration files. Orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes are used to launch and manage containers. A special online course offered by Linux Foundation can help to get the basic knowledge of Kubernetes.

When you are ready to become a DevOps engineer

DevOps engineers’ responsibilities differ from organization to organization. To know what skills and knowledge your potential employer expects you to have, you may go to several job interviews. After the technical interview, ask for feedback to get a clearer understanding of skills you may lack and technologies you need to embrace.

We’ve already mentioned several DevOps-related technologies in the article. Below is a more comprehensive list of tools most commonly required to get a job in DevOps:

Version control systems (Git, Team Foundation Server (TFS), Apache Subversion, etc.).
Continuous integration tools (Jenkins, Travis CI, TeamCity, and others).
Software deployment automation platforms (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.).
Systems monitoring tools (Grafana, Zabbix, Prometheus, and the like).
Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alibaba Cloud, and more).
Container orchestration tools (such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, OpenShift, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), AWS EKS).

Starting your career as a junior DevOps engineer usually requires only system administration experience and basic knowledge of appropriate technologies. If you eagerly enrich your background theoretical knowledge with practical skills, your career will develop much faster.

DevOps as a promising area for IT career development

DevOps as a concept will develop further embracing modern development and operations practices. To get acquainted with DevOps and learn how to become a DevOps engineer, start from continuous integration, delivery and deployment practices, as well as the appropriate infrastructure management tools. Then, invest your time and efforts to study such technologies as Jenkins, GoCD, Docker, and others.

The experience of working as a DevOps engineer will allow you to understand better all the processes within the project implementation, therefore, potentially you’ll be able to continue your career as a DevOps manager.

Infrastructure Management