Modernizing IT Infrastructure with Google Cloud

Part 3 of this book will focus on the infrastructure component of cloud systems as we explore the different hosting services and best practices for cloud operations. Chapter 7 in particular will focus on the evolution of IT infrastructure. We’ll dig into the challenges associated with running traditional systems and why they struggle in the modern world. We’ll also highlight the value of modernizing infrastructure with cloud technologies, the differences between hybrid and multi-cloud, and navigate the evolution of computing from mainframes to virtual machines (VMs) to containers.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

• Explain how the evolution of customer needs causes challenges for legacy infrastructure
• Describe the advantages of cloud technologies and modernizing infrastructure
• Compare and contrast virtualization, containerization, and serverless

The chapter covers...

The challenges with legacy infrastructure in the modern world

In an increasingly interconnected, globalized world, organizations have had to transform themselves to service their customers, battle competitors, and continue to grow. Firms who might’ve thought of themselves as regional or national players began to understand that expanding beyond their region or nation was becoming more cost-effective, safe, and practical. Opening up a new market such as Europe, South America, or Asia provided the opportunity to service hundreds of millions of new customers while also introducing complexity to the business.

For a manufacturing company, this may mean continuing to manufacture a product domestically while shipping it overseas. However, what if your product is not price-competitive in certain markets due to the labor cost of your domestic market? For some folks, it may make more sense to spin up manufacturing capacity in India or South America to specifically serve those markets...

The value of modernizing infrastructure with cloud technologies

The traditional approach to managing applications and their infrastructure is to treat each application as a unique system that needs to be tended to on an individual level. Each server was sized to meet the individual needs of an application and a lot of time was dedicated to servicing them. With the shift to the cloud, where the management of the underlying hardware could be abstracted away from infrastructure teams, the mentality around managing technology systems has shifted from managing the individual server to treating servers like a herd and managing the herd at scale.

This approach allows technology teams to be much more efficient with their headcount and skills development, given that work that would normally be the full-time job of an engineer is offloaded to code and automation. Rather than having an engineering team provision 100 physical servers for a specific project, which can take months depending on...

The differences between hybrid and multi-cloud

Whenever a technology team decides to adopt one cloud or multiple cloud infrastructure platforms, these platforms may need to be integrated with other existing systems. Whether there were existing on-premises environments that they wanted to migrate or were already using a different platform, there may be nuances for how to properly connect them to ensure secure communications.

Let’s go ahead and clarify the classification for the different terms.

A hybrid cloud environment is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with public cloud services. This allows organizations to keep some of their data and applications on-premises, while others are moved to the public cloud.

Hybrid cloud environments make sense when an organization has already made meaningful investments in its on-premises infrastructure and may not be able to fully migrate all of its infrastructure. There may also be systems that...

The evolution of computing from VMs to containers to serverless

Earlier in this chapter, we touched on the evolution of computing from mainframes and applications with dedicated servers to VMs, where you can purchase hardware in bulk and allocate portions of it to different applications. This evolution was extremely meaningful as VMware rose to glory and organizations around the world adopted virtualization, making computing more cost-effective.

VMs are software that emulates a physical computer. Each VM has an operating system and resources, such as CPU, memory, and storage. VMs can be used to run any type of application, including web applications, databases, and development environments.

Some of the challenges with virtualization include resource efficiency, agility, scalability, and cost. Because each VM requires an operating system, VMs will require the resources to run a full guest operating system as well as the application, which consumes significant resources. This dependence...

Summary

Technology teams will need to consider many different factors when deciding how to host an application and where to host it. Organizations that have legacy applications or the need to retain some level of on-premises infrastructure may choose to stay on-premises or adopt hybrid cloud environments where they land applications that make sense in cloud environments while retaining their on-premises environments for specific applications.

In other circumstances, where an organization is a mature digital native company that was born in the cloud, they may choose to adopt a multi-cloud approach to infrastructure, where they leverage multiple cloud providers to avoid challenges related to vendor lock-in and access to innovation.

Ultimately, there is no silver bullet for solving infrastructure problems, but organizations will weave together a symphony of services and infrastructure to solve specific business problems and technology challenges. A startup may choose to build everything...