Understanding BaseOps and the foundational concepts

BaseOps might not be a familiar term to all, although you could guess what it means: basic operations. In cloud environments, this is more often referred to as cloud operations. BaseOps is mainly about operating the cloud environment in the most efficient way possible by making optimal use of the cloud services that major providers offer on the different layers: network, compute, storage, but also PaaS and SaaS.

The main objective of BaseOps is to ensure that cloud systems are available to the organization and that these can safely be used to do the following:

• Monitor network capacity and appropriately route traffic.
• Monitor the capacity of compute resources and adjust this to the business requirements.
• Monitor the capacity of storage resources and adjust this to the business requirements.
• Monitor the availability of resources, including health checks for backups and ensuring that systems can be recovered when required.
• Monitor the...

Managing the base infrastructure

After we have defined and deployed a landing zone in a public cliud platform, there are quite a number of building blocks that we will have to manage from that point onward. In this section we will discuss how we can manage these building blocks. Firstly, we need to be able to connect to the landing zone and that requires connectivity.

Implement and manage connectivity

One of the most used technologies is the VPN, the Virtual Private Network. In essence, a VPN is a tunnel using the internet as a carrier. It connects from a certain IP address or IP range to the IP address of a gateway server in the public cloud.

Before we get into this, you have to be aware of what a public cloud is. If you as a business deploy services in Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba Cloud or any other public cloud you are extending your data center to that cloud. It therefore needs a connection between your data center and that extension in the public cloud. The easiest and probably also...

Managing the landing zone using policies

When we work in cloud platforms, we work with code. Everything we do in the cloud is software- and code-defined. This makes the cloud infrastructure absolutely very agile, but it also means that we need some strict guidance in terms of how we manage the code, starting with the code that defines our landing zone or foundation environment. As with everything in IT, it needs maintenance. In traditional data centers and systems, we have maintenance windows where we can update and upgrade systems. In the cloud, things work a little differently.

First, the cloud providers apply maintenance whenever it's needed. There's no way that they can agree upon maintenance windows with thousands of customers spread across the globe. They simply do whatever needs to be done to keep the platform healthy, ready for improvements and the release of new features. Enterprises don't want to be impacted by these maintenance activities, so they will have to...

Understanding the need for demarcation

Typically, when we talk about demarcation in cloud models, we refer to the matrix or delineation of responsibility: who's responsible for what in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS computing? The following diagram shows the very basics of this matrix:

Figure 6.6 – Demarcation model in cloud deployment

However, we need a much more granular model in multi-cloud. We have been discussing policies throughout this chapter and by now, we should have concluded that it's not very easy to draw some very sharp lines when it comes to responsibilities in our multi-cloud environment. Just look at the solution stack – even in SaaS solutions, there might be certain security and/or compliancy policies that the solution needs to adhere to. Even something such as an operating system might already be causing issues in terms of hardening: are monitoring agents from a PaaS provider allowed or not? Can we run them alongside our preferred monitoring solution...

Summary

In this chapter, we have designed and set up our landing zones in the different major cloud platforms. We have learned that the foundational principles might be comparable, but the actual underlying implementation of the landing zone concepts do differ. We studied these various concepts, such as enterprise-scale in Azure and Control Tower in AWS.

We also learned how to work with patterns to define the components of the landing zone, starting with connectivity. VPN-connections are still the most used way to connect to public clouds, but enterprises might also choose for direct, dedicated connections. In this chapter the various direct connectivity offers of Azure, AWS, GCP and Alibaba have been discussed. As soon as we have connectivity, we can start managing the workloads in cloud. Main concern for administrators is to keep resources and configurations consistent in different deployments.

Finally, we learned that there's a need for a redundant demarcation model in multi-cloud...

Questions

1. A basic infrastructure in the cloud consists of five major domains, three of which are network, compute, and storage. What are two other domains?
2. What service does Azure offer to provide scaling of landing zones?
3. AWS offers a service that enables central management of guardrails for resources. What’s the name of this service?
4. Where does RAM stand for in Alibaba Cloud?

Further reading

• Azure for Architects, by Ritesh Modi, Packt Publishing
• Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions, by Kevin L. Jackson, Packt Publishing

Optimizing your multi-cloud environment

Cloud providers offer advisor tools we can use to optimize environments that are hosted on their platforms. In this section, we will briefly look at these different tools and how we can use them.

Optimizing environments using Azure Advisor

Like AWS, Azure offers a tool to help optimize environments, called Azure Advisor. Azure Advisor is a service that helps in analyzing our Azure environments and making recommendations around the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. Next to this, we should evaluate the support plans.

Let’s start with the support plans. Azure offers four types of plans: basic, developer, standard, and professional direct. The basic plan is free, while the most expensive one is professional direct. However, you can’t compare this to the enterprise plan of AWS. Every provider offers free and paid services—the difference per provider is which services are free or must be paid for.

Azure...

Optimizing in OCI

In OCI, we will find a number of tools that will help us in optimizing workloads.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring provides real-time performance metrics, logs, and alerts to help optimize the performance of OCI resources. It monitors the health and performance of resources such as compute instances, load balancers, and databases.

Another tool is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Advisor, which analyzes OCI resources and provides recommendations to help optimize your infrastructure. It offers suggestions for improving performance, reducing costs, and enhancing security.

Next to this, OCI also offers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resource Manager, which helps to automate the creation, deployment, and management of resources. It offers a simple way to manage infrastructure as code and ensure consistency across your environment.

Use case: creating solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery

Now that we have gathered the business requirements, identified the risks, and considered our application strategy, including the usage of PaaS and SaaS, we can start thinking about solutions and align these with the requirements. The best way to do this is to create a matrix with the systems, the requirements for resilience, and the chosen technology to get the required resilience. The following table shows a very simple example of this, with purely fictional numbers:

System or system group/category	Business level	RTO	RPO	Solution
Application X	Critical	<2 hours	<...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the definitions of resilience and performance. Companies want their applications to be available and to perform well: it defines the customer experience. We discussed various concepts that developers can use to build performant and resilient applications, using cloud-native tools as much as possible in 12-factor apps, PaaS, and SaaS.

We also learned how to optimize our environments using different advisory tools that cloud providers offer. We then learned how to identify risks in the various layers: business, data, applications, and technology. We studied the various methods we can use to mitigate these risks.

One of the biggest risks is that we “lose” systems without the ability to retrieve data from backups or without the possibility of failover to other systems. For real business-critical systems, we might want to have disaster recovery, but at a minimum, we need to have proper backup solutions in place. Various backup...

Questions

1. What do the terms RPO and RTO stand for?
2. What tool would you use to capture failures in application code that’s running in Google Cloud?
3. Cloud providers offer toolkits to develop SaaS applications. Name the service that AWS offers to build and host SaaS applications.
4. True or false: We can use the backup solutions in Azure and AWS for systems that are hosted on-premises too.

Further reading

• Reliability and Resilience on AWS, by Alan Rodrigues, Packt Publishing
• Architecting for High Availability on Azure, by Rajkumar Balakrishan, Packt Publishing

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