Providing & Operations

For each service, you need to determine the right operation environment.

Short formulas like “move to the cloud” work for many, and we do embrace such solutions. We are experienced in running virtual machines and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as in Microsoft Azure. We have also worked with OpenStack, mainly with the implementation provided byRedHet and as run by Rackspace. All of these require a minimum of identity management (i.e. a user account) and some minor virtual network configuration. Let’s do that. Then all of these providers also offer Software as a service (SaaS), most importantly for database management, backup, and redundancy / load balancing. All of these to be configured properly.

However, the public cloud may not be for everyone: Essentially it’s someone else’s computer your application are running on, somewhere far away. Also there is usually very little you can do if any of them should not be available for some period. There have been outages and there will be again.

Enter the hybrid cloud: Splitting services between public and locally operated infrastructure provides you with everything from a local backup of your data and configuration, to a fully avaialable in-house fall-back, and allows you much tighter control over the whole communication stack than the cloud provider can supply you with.

And then there is always the option to run your infrastructure locally – not like in the old days, but as a virtualized environment, too. Our own expertise lies with the Linux-provided KVM solutions, which also provide you with some dgree of flexibility while keeping complexity low, and there is always the option to deploy a local instance of Open Stack, as provided by one of the distributors. Full control here.

IT operations is usually organized in ITIL-like processes, which encompass the most relevant duties in running any infrastrcture: Configuration Management (initially and continuously), Incidient Management (i.e. keeping someone on duty who can react on any indicidents, does propoer documentation and allows for future prevention of similar cases by feeding that into change management) and Capacity Management to allow your service to grow. All properly monitored and reported on – independent of whether it runs far away of in your basement.

These are the areas where we can support you and where we can provide solutions.