Well, cloud has surely become the most used technological solution in the modern era. You will be surprised to know that by the end of 2023, cloud spending will surpass traditional IT spending and it will continue to grow in the future as well. By moving to the cloud platform, businesses are able to get more control over their data, enhance security, promote collaboration and get things done more quickly. Well, there are many cloud solutions being used by businesses in the current era but cloud hosting is surely the most used cloud computing solution among all businesses and industries.
Cloud hosting is simply the shift of desktop installed business application on the cloud server of the cloud hosting provider. Nowadays, businesses are abandoning the traditional practice of using the application by installing it on the desktop. With the advent of cloud, most of the businesses have started using the cloud hosting solution in which the business solution is hosted on the cloud server instead of being installed on the desktop. In order to host the software on the cloud, the business needs to find the best cloud vendor and pay them fixed monthly or yearly fee.
Well, there is no denial in the fact that if you are using cloud hosting solution then you will not have to worry about the technical stuff as the cloud vendor will take care of it but still, there are some technical aspects of cloud that you should know about and one such aspect is Cloudops.
Cloudops is the short form of cloud operation and it is basically the formalization of the best procedures and practices that allow cloud based solutions, platforms and data to function properly over a long period of time. This is one of the most important concepts to know about if you are dealing with cloud hosting because you should know that cloud computing is not defined by your ability to get the workload on the cloud but it is defined by the ability to deal with real business problems in minimal possible time.
There is no denial in the fact that cloud is no more a new kid on the block and this is why many cloud platform features are not completely new but the growth of cloud brings a wide range of its properties to the public cloud based platform. This is why people dealing with Cloudops or Cloud operations need to define the right operational practices and procedures around what the cloud based solution can do rather than applying the traditional approach to cloud operation.
In simple words, moving to cloud hosting is surely an important step for any business but staying on the cloud platform and functioning effectively depends on what type of operational procedure and operational excellence you have applied and achieved.
You should know that the only thing on which Cloudops relies is a continuous operation. This is actually the approach to operations that basically comes out from the best practices applied within Devops. With continuous operation, you will be able to use the cloud hosting solution in such a way that you can easily achieve the zero downtime goal from the operational point of view.
In order to achieve zero downtime goal, the software, even while being used on the cloud platform should be regularly updated and placed into production without any type of interference. Therefore, when we talk about continuous operation in terms of Cloudops then we mean installing all the mechanism that facilitates zero downtime to occur seamlessly.
But you should know that this will mess with the Devops that underway in your organization. Devops is basically a combination of both operations and development. But it is also about automating everything. In Devops, we basically automate a long list of things like testing, development, integration, staging, deployment and operation as well.
This is why continuous operation simply means never stopping the operation and this is how businesses can achieve zero downtime goal with Cloudops as it is basically based on the continuous operation. Through continuous operation, you can surely make redundancy as the best practice in your organization. And this redundancy can be practiced at both the cloud provider layer and at the application layer.
If you using cloud hosting then it becomes very necessary for you to know that redundancy is the core of each and every type of cloud solution. Some years ago, the use of a redundancy system was actually a very costly solution and this is why most of them were changed with operating system that used only a single server. In such a situation, when the server was being updated or repaired, then the operation has to be stopped. Well, this type of system didn’t facilitate complete continuous operation and businesses have to face interruption during updates and maintenance.
There are many organizations that face downtime, both planned and unplanned and according to a very famous study, unplanned data center downtime still remains one of the biggest threats for most of the businesses. Well, all these types of downtime has been managed and reduced with the approach of continuous operation and this is why Cloudops matters so much in the cloud. Without high uptime from operation point of view in the cloud, you will never be able to achieve 100% effectiveness and efficiency.