Cloud Services

Cloud Services

Discovery

• A “paid” service that uses third party tools to blueprint an existing  environment (physical/virtual) with speed and accuracy
• Captures an accurate profile of an existing environment
• Necessary pre-requisite for cloud migrations

Lift & Shift Migration

• In a ‘Lift-and-Shift’, the emphasis is on migration speed (and cost).
• Systems are moved from their current location (e.g., a hosting provider or internal data center) and are moved to a cloud provider with little or no change to the architecture or configuration.
• Because energy isn’t spent rethinking the architecture, the time required to make a move it typically very quick.
• Applications may not be leveraging the elastic properties of the cloud like auto-scaling. In Lift-and-Shift the cloud is treated as an on-demand, pay-per-use hosting environment.

Lift & Refit Migration

Applications are redeployed onto a cloud with a moderate number of changes that allow them to take advantage of many of the popular cloud capabilities such as:

• Auto-healing & recovery
• Data backup & restore
• Auto-scaling (up/down) based on current or predicted usage
• Orchestrated provisioning
• Monitoring & alerting
• In a Lift-and-Refit, there are typically no code changes made to the system.
• The refitting occurs outside of the code by repackaging the software and giving the cloud environment enough information about the software to automate common operational activities, leading to reduced maintenance.

Cloud Modernization

Applications are redesigned from the ground-up with the assumption they will be deployed in a cloud environment.

Common changes made in a re-engineering effort include:

• Moving from a stateful to stateless service design
• Reducing storage costs by using scale-out storage strategies
• Sun-setting fixed networking approaches in favor of software defined networking (SDN)
• Removing expensive commercial software licenses in favor of open cloud friendly licenses like open source
• Switching from disk intensive designs to large memory footprints

Reengineering applications for a native cloud environment provide the greatest degree of flexibility however are also the most costly in the short term.

Over time, the new app may provide enough benefits related to reduced administrative costs, reduced computing charges or other cost recovery vehicles to warrant an over-haul

Cloud Brokerage

• A cloud services brokerage (CSB) plays an intermediary
• role in cloud computing. CSBs make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers.
• A cloud broker enhances a given service by improving some specific capability and provides the value-added service to cloud consumers
• A cloud broker combines and integrates multiple services into one or more new services
• Service arbitrage is similar to service aggregation, with the difference in that the services being aggregated aren’t fixed. Service arbitrage allows flexible and opportunistic choices for the broker

Accomplishments

GE Digital

Our present Cloud / DevOps endeavor is with GE Digital where we are helping them with their Industrial Internet of Things, IIOT, called PREDIX which is their platform for the Industrial Internet that is powering digital industrial businesses that drive the global economy. By connecting industrial equipment, analyzing data, and delivering real-time insights, Predix-based apps are unleashing new levels of performance for a wide variety of assets. US East is providing Architecture, Systems Engineering/Programming, Project Planning and Documentation services in helping launch this dynamic industrial platform.

Raymond James

Lead the effort to develop a "DevOps Center of Competence". Instrumental in laying the foundation to provide digitally consistent infrastructure & automated app deployments

GE Capital

Fully automate the building, testing, and deployment of infrastructure and software via Chef DevOps Automation

The City of New York

Architecting and implementing continuous delivery pipelines to support workloads for internal/external and public/private cloud deployments.