Cloud Computing
and Hosting
Capital investment was a huge problem for younger companies for it was almost impossible to predict the demand. Every company had to build its ow infrastructure for product delivery – Routers, Switches, Servers, VPN, Storage. Many companies could not afford this and could not get to the market. With the Cloud, CAPEX becomes OPEX – this helps companies with better financial management. The costs are minimal for the resources can be consumed based on the need and demand. It has given fresh impetus to start-ups to minimize their costs to get to the market. Cloud Computing has revolutionized product delivery. The mid-sized and larger corporation has followed the trend set by younger companies and moving their infrastructure to Cloud. Though Cloud implementation is simpler than traditional data-centric approach, it needs highly specialized skills. Every Cloud is different and needs specialized skills to architect the right solution so that the product, infrastructure, and storage can scale. We have helped our customers by managing their infrastructure on Cloud. With the growth of data and computational needs, the needs of IT – dev-ops, sys admins, security experts have increased. Moogilu can help customers with IT Architecture, Capacity Planning, Deployment, and Support. Though Cloud is widely used, most companies will continue to maintain Hybrid infrastructure – combination of on premise, public cloud, and private cloud. Moogilu can help with hybrid architectures and manage staging and product infrastructure 24×7. Since products are released continuously, Moogilu can help with build automation and release management including hosting the tools and repositories securely.
Moogilu solution include:
Moogilu has built expertise to support Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The solutions provided by each Cloud provider are unique. Each has their distinct advantages. As an infrastructure, they can all scale. Cloud choice is based on the workload, costs, security, eased of logging, monitoring, and customer/application specific needs.
Cloud Security
The infrastructure has moved from data center to cloud and this implies that security issues have also moved to Cloud. The problems of security have not disappeared in Cloud and they are in fact very real. With most companies moving their applications online, the threats posed in terms of data theft is a huge problem. It is imperative that cloud infrastructure be secure. The basic infrastructure protection measures are followed at Moogilu. This includes keeping patches up to date on all our cloud servers, security scanning for vulnerabilities, and also PCI scanning for customers with payment transaction.
Dynamic Firewall protection: It is very likely that in any infrastructure that ports could be opened inadvertently. This can be automatically closed using our partner’s toolkit.
Cloud Iaas Remote Access: With the tool it is easy to enable 1-click, on-demand secure access for admins and developers.
Automate Policy Management: This is generally a nightmare with companies spread out throughout the world with different groups – IT, devs, dev-ops, dbas, etc. And each of the groups in different regions need different access levels. This can be done easily by setting up Role based controls. And it is easy to share this policy or copy this policy to derive newer policies.
Cloud Security at Massive Scale: Some of the Cloud installations are really large – and could be literally thousands of servers. It is imperative that Group based security policy control be set up to manage policy management at massive scales.
Generic Cloud Security Features provided through Moogilu partners include:
Amazon Specific Features include:
Moogilu can help implement Cloud on Google, Amazon, Azure, and Rackspace. In addition, we can provide Cloud infrastructure and application monitoring, URL monitoring, 24×7 support of Cloud, IT, and Applications.
Cloud Monitoring
With Moogilu’s Cloud Monitoring, the customer has an instant awareness of IT infrastructure. Being pro-active helps customer maintain their internal and external SLA. Moogilu implements Nagios Monitoring – the leader in Monitoring solutions. Using Nagios and extending it further to suit our needs, we monitor servers, gateways, webservers, databases, switches, applications, and services. Every application that is managed by Moogilu is extended to include application specific parameters. Every parameter has a well-defined threshold. If the threshold is exceeded, an alert is sent to the live IT engineer to resolve the issue. At Moogilu we believe that customers deserve 24×7 support with live engineer. No matter how much the systems are automated, we absolutely believe in an expert engineer’s intervention to manage and resolve the issue. The Alerts could be system, database, application, network, and application. Our engineers have in-depth experience to resolve the issues pro-actively. It is impossible to manage and resolve an issue without a Runbook. Every issue that occurs in the system has well-defined steps to resolve. This is captured in a Runbook, and all our engineers are trained to use the Runbook. Every parameter and alerts are available for customers. Every parameter can be stored as long as needed for analysis. And we also provide a chart view for it is easier to understand the trend.There are very good monitoring solutions provided by Google, Amazon, and other third party solutions. Since Moogilu customers could be in a heterogeneous cloud environment, it is best to use Nagios along with Cacti; Ganglia, and URL monitoring. This helps our cloud engineers triangulate problems fast. In addition, we support product specific tools. For example, to monitor Cassandra, it is imperative that we support another tool to manage Cassandra cluster better.
With Moogilu’s Cloud Monitoring you can:
With Nagios and Moogilu’s custom application extension, we can monitor literally hundreds of parameters.
System parameters that can be monitored include:
CPU Usage and Load, File System, Networking, Performance, Storage Subsystem, Uptime, Memory, Processes, Time, Users
Operating systems include:
Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS, BSD
Databases that can be monitored include:
MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, Apache Cassandra
Java Applications and Servers include:
Apache Tomcat, WebLogic, JBOSS, WebSphere
If monitoring solution does not exist, we can extend Nagios plugin to monitor any application.Nagios may not be detailed enough to troubleshoot detailed system issues. To help engineers analyze and resolve issues, we support Netflix Vector – on host monitoring tool, which give real time statistics and Monitorix which give average statistics for the day.The combination of Application specific monitoring, System Wide monitoring using Nagios/Cacti, On Host real time monitoring using Vector, and On Host average statistics using Monitorix; a complete view of the application and system is available to the engineers to analyze, debug, and resolve issues.
Cloud Logging
In a complex environment, logging is fairly complex with hundreds of servers logging. The logs have to be centralized and should be searchable. With Google Cloud, logging is provided automatically and there is no need for a custom solution. This is not necessarily true for other Cloud solutions.We enforce the discipline of each application logging. And this logs are directed to a distributed logging service using Logstash (Kibana). Since Logstash is highly scalable, we can handle as much load as desired by adding servers to Logstash data logging cluster. In addition, we can build custom solutions to filter logs, aggregate logs using Spark, and also export data for further data analysis. The data can be exported to Hadoop, Cassandra, or to any big data NoSQL server including Google BigTable or BigQuery.