Head in the Cloud: How Digital Innovation Can Be Scalable

Topics
The Cloud
Author
Saira Timmerman
Publication Date
4 July 2019

Head in the Cloud: How Digital Innovation Can Be Scalable

Digital innovation needs the cloud

Cloud computing is and will continue to be a hot topic, as it is the foundation of many IT services, applications, and platforms. Mobiquity’s VP Engineering Jieke Pan takes you through the many benefits of being Cloud native.

Scalability and flexibility through Cloud

You can pay per specific service your company needs at any given time. This provides flexible options over operating with a physical data center. It’s easy to scale up and down based on how the business is doing at any given time.
 

Cloud service providers

There are many accountable Cloud providers and platforms in the market at present, and they all offer a certain level of support and a range of similar services to help you achieve what you want for your business. But which one works best for your company? First, identify the boundaries of your software solution, and where your business fits into the market. Necessary services for banking solutions will be very different than the ones needed for one less regulation heavy industries.

Native support: AWS Cloud benefits

Based on the offerings of different Cloud providers, AWS is likely the best choice in terms of security and compliance, as well as completeness of different managed services. Don’t be worried about being locked in with AWS, however. There’s a myriad of different approaches, like going with container technology and a Cloud agnostic approach. This lets you run your application anywhere and everywhere, and shift between different providers and platforms.
 
In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a pay-as-you-go billing model. This allowed developers to pay for the individual services they needed, for as long as they would use them, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing agreements. This became a great alternative to expensive physical data centers that were not as technically or financially flexible.
 

Leveraging containers 

Make sure you understand correctly what leveraging containers means for you. On a broader level, Cloud is a huge platform of containers, where you can scale infinitely. On a narrower scale, your applications can run in their own application containers, such as Spring Boot. Even if your entire solution is containerized via a program like Docker, you still need to provide the underlying infrastructure (read: operating system support) needed to support the whole orchestration.
 

Going serverless?

If this is starting to sound daunting, managing all your own infrastructures even in the Cloud, you may think going serverless is right for you. Unfortunately, it’s also not the ultimate answer to all of your problems. Going serverless has all the same requirements as containerization, the only difference being that you don’t have to deploy and manage the runtime instances by yourself.

There is a wide range of choices for your business, however, none of these promising choices, tackle the issue of writing code to deploy infrastructure in the cloud, also known as infrastructure provisioning.

Conclusion: to cloud or not to cloud?

Think about your business needs and make a supported decision:
 
  • How much traffic do you want to achieve with your first launch?
  • Are your operations long pulling, push, or continuous processing?
  • Do you need to support synchronous or asynchronous operations?
Find out what your solution requires from the Cloud based on the functional requirements of your business. Providers like AWS will give you the tools and the room to make proper choices, so it’ll be up to you to decide how to best leverage the growing number of options.

The Cloud is a multi-functional octopus, with all the adaptability, versatility, and near limitless potential you need and more. Getting on the Cloud can make your business lean and more profitable, and if you take the time to understand what your business needs are, then you’ll be best positioned to get the most out of this octopus’s reach and ingenuity.

Join the discussion

October 3, 2019 Mobiquity hosts an mClass event around digital innovation in The Netherlands, sharing knowledge on Cloud services and more. Want to join us during this event to talk to peers in your industry about these topics?
Check the mClass - Digital Innovation in The Netherlands event page.

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