In the last decade we have seen huge changes in the IT ecosystem, one above all is the rise of the Cloud. Paolo Carta (software and DevOps engineer; freelancer at Red Hat) explains to us the importance of this new technology in modern businesses.
To succeed launching a start-up, you may need evolving fast (speed), flexibility (agile), scaling up and down, and no big up front investments. Over time, amazing opportunities have appeared when creating a start-up. Decades ago, you would need to invest lots of money for buying IT infrastructures: servers, networking, buildings, software licences, building up and maintaining the infrastructures. In 2022, there is the use of Cloud, a million machines connected to a network, which offer the infrastructure as a service: laaS model: computing power and storage.
The main benefit of the cloud is the opportunity to rent (instead of buying them) IT infrastructures and pay for what you use. Start simple and small, use the potential of the cloud to scale if needed.
Speed: you can provision infrastructure within a few min giving flexibility and making sizing less important.
Scalability: you can always add counting power, storage or additional systems according o the needs, you can also scale down.
Reliability: you can specify zones and regions; it is easier to build fault tolerant systems through redundancy using multiple zones and regions in the Cloud. Replicate data in multiple regions, making backup and disaster recovery a lot easier.
Global scale: you can easily spin up infrastructures closer to the user in several cloud regions, therefore improving performance.
Experimenting new tech: experiment and delete it when you do not need it anymore.
To succeed launching a start-up, you may need evolving fast (speed), flexibility (agile), scaling up and down, and no big up front investments. Over time, amazing opportunities have appeared when creating a start-up. Decades ago, you would need to invest lots of money for buying IT infrastructures: servers, networking, buildings, software licences, building up and maintaining the infrastructures. In 2022, there is the use of Cloud, a million machines connected to a network, which offer the infrastructure as a service: laaS model: computing power and storage.
The main benefit of the cloud is the opportunity to rent (instead of buying them) IT infrastructures and pay for what you use. Start simple and small, use the potential of the cloud to scale if needed.
Speed: you can provision infrastructure within a few min giving flexibility and making sizing less important.
Scalability: you can always add counting power, storage or additional systems according o the needs, you can also scale down.
Reliability: you can specify zones and regions; it is easier to build fault tolerant systems through redundancy using multiple zones and regions in the Cloud. Replicate data in multiple regions, making backup and disaster recovery a lot easier.
Global scale: you can easily spin up infrastructures closer to the user in several cloud regions, therefore improving performance.
Experimenting new tech: experiment and delete it when you do not need it anymore.
As the cloud is a new technology, there are still possibilities to improve it such as building and deploying applications, making application portable and vendor Lock-in. The cloud is the foundation of modern software but laaS is a low level attraction. Indeed, it is now related to traditional computing (from serverless to traditional computing: FaaS - AaaS - CaaS - LaaS). Kubernetes Cloud architecture enables app packaging in a portable way and delivers them to an orchestration tool. To make the best of this technology, use a mix of cloud services and consider containers and Kubernetes for scaling. Kubernetes allows to abstract the underlying infrastructure. It has several functionalities: placing apps on the infrastructure, running many apps, scaling, and failure recovery.
Cloud and orchestration are necessary incremental steps for a successful startup but the biggest challenges are the human challenges. According to Paolo Carta, be open and blameless culture, honest with respectful communication, keeping a continuous learning, and sharing knowledge.