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Cloud Migration Best Practices for High Availability

March 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Cloud Migration Best Practices for High Availability

In 2020 we have seen more enterprises migrating more of their mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. However, not all of these migrations have been smooth. I have personally witnessed cloud migration projects dramatically slowed and even stopped due to a lack of planning for application availability, the complexity of retrofitting ‘DIY High Availability’, misunderstanding related to what a ‘lift and shift’ entails and unexpected costs.

There are a number of best practices, cloud checklists, and other ways for organizations to prepare for the cloud. The following best practices should be factored into every migration strategy for high availability clustering for those who have either hit pause on their 2020 cloud migration, or plan to forge ahead in 2021.

Cloud Migration Best Practices

Gather the requirements

Many organizations moving to the cloud think that the cloud is an on-premises architecture moved to the cloud. This misunderstanding in cloud migration often leads to stalls and delays when networking, storage, disk speeds, and system sizes for on-premises collide with the cloud reality. A smoother transition to cloud begins by gathering the real requirements for the infrastructure, governance and compliance, security, sizing, and related controls and resources.

Design and Document

In the design phase, the architecture of on-premises environments is mapped to the cloud environment that has been chosen for maximum availability and thoroughly documented. In this phase, as the architecture takes shape and you identify the strategy for IPs, load balancers, IOPS, and data availability. Teams need to look at how availability native to the cloud needs to be augmented with a robust application and infrastructure availability solution capable of automating complexities of the cloud. At SIOS, our experts in AWS and Azure clustering and availability work with customers to swap on-premises NFS for AWS EFS, Azure ANF, or a standalone NFS cluster tier. Additionally, a key part of the successful implementation in this phase will be documenting everything. Documentation is an often-neglected, but essential element of migration success.

Plan for High Availability

Achieving high availability in the cloud requires understanding the requirements, creating the design, and documenting a plan that lays out a strategy for achieving those requirements. A basic plan should include staffing, staff training, deploying a QA system testing, pre-production steps, deployment, post deployment validation, and on-going iterations. The best outcomes for cloud migration arise from a deliberate, planned process; not an ad hoc, break-fix approach.

Staff

How well is your team staffed for the cloud migration? Traditional help desk, client/server IT, or IT teams may not be enough for the cloud migration. If your team is new to the cloud, it may be time to consider adding more resources or professional services-based solutions. Migrating to the cloud can be taxing, tedious, and difficult without the proper insight, information, or training. Does your staff need to incorporate training related to the cloud environment? And while you are looking into training and professional services to assist your IT team, check with your vendor for training related to the availability solution. Many vendors provide flexible training for the HA solution and cloud training can be obtained with the cloud vendors or popular sites such as Udemy.

Deploy QA

The QA deployment phase is the phase in which the team executes the plans for deploying the actual systems into the cloud. Successful deployment teams validate their plans and strategy, understand the data migration process, uncover any missing dependencies, and prepare for the next step in the process, especially testing. When this step is skipped or skimped on, the once-promising migrations often stall or fail. When you reach the QA system deployment phase, your team will do the heavy lifting of the initial migration and configuration of the applications, databases, and critical data in the cloud.

Test Your High Availability

Testing in your QA environment is a critical step. These tests are not a waste of time; they are a time saver. Deploying environments in the cloud is often easier than deploying on-premises. Your QA environment can be scripted with tools like Ansible, deployed quickly as templates from the cloud marketplace or a cloned image, or deployed and built from cloud formation templates. Once deployed, disaster scenarios can be ironed out and optimized before a disaster, not in them. Test scenarios can be leveraged to identify overprovisioning, under-provisioning or bottlenecks with networking or disk speeds. A full test scenario can also be used as a part of an on-boarding strategy for new staff. Additionally, testing should be performed on snapshots and backups as well.

Deploy Production

When the testing phase completes, and your team has validated the test results, the next phase is to move from QA to pre-production, and from pre-production to go-live. The testing phase is the last phase of the heavy lifting involving final user acceptance testing, a final cutover and update of the production data, and then the users.

Review, Revise, and Repeat

A successful migration does not end once you reach the go-live phase, but continues through the lifecycle phases. In the post go-live phase of the cloud migration strategy, your team continues to review, revise, and repeat the steps from ‘Gather’ through ‘Deploy Production’. In fact, your team should repeat this process again and again, based on requirements specific to releases, application updates, security updates, related system maintenance, operating system versions, disaster recovery planning, as well as the requirements from your high availability vendor’s own best practices. The cloud platform is always evolving and adding new features, functionality, and updates that can enhance your existing HA solution and architecture. Reviewing, revising, and repeating the process will be a necessary step in successful onboarding.

In 2021 we’ll see more enterprises migrating more mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases to the cloud. A key major factor in their success will be utilizing cloud migration best practices to avoid delays and failures throughout the process. Understanding your business requirements and needs, documenting the design and plan, deploying in a QA environment with purpose built clustering solutions, and executing extensive testing before go-live will be essential. Contact SIOS Technology to understand how the SIOS Protection Suite can be included in your thoughtful cloud migration best practices.

-Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

Do I Even Need High Availability software in the Cloud?

January 23, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Do I Even Need High Availability software in the Cloud?

Allow me to jog your memory . . .

Maybe today you haven’t had a failure in a dozen or more months and suddenly the slam dunk renewal for your high availability software licenses is under the redline of the CFO’s pen. Or perhaps, due in part to the overuse of the term, clever marketing, or the redefinition of high availability your CIO, once the most die-hard availability fan, has begun to waver on its value. Or maybe, just maybe it’s not the CFO or the CIO, but you who decided that you might have enough HA without needing high or higher availability software in the equation.

While the public cloud is incredibly resilient and availability has been considered at many turns, the need for stable, maintainable high availability software is still a present reality. Consider 2020 for example, advances in public cloud computing and availability have still been unable to prevent common mishaps such as bad practice and bad code causing an application crash, undisclosed data center failures, nameless construction snafus affecting power or networking, capacity overload on a VM, or cooling system failures as noted by one CRN article.

Here are seven reasons you still need higher availability software in the Cloud:

1. For increased depth and breadth of application coverage for your most critical enterprise applications

No single Cloud vendor will have all the tools, software, and applications you need baked into their cloud infrastructure in a way that your enterprise can consume. Because of this, you will likely migrate workloads to the cloud into IaaS offerings that require someone or something to protect these workloads and make sure they are highly available.

2. For automated and intelligent application recovery of systems, resources and their dependencies.

Cloud vendors know about clouds. High availability vendors know about application high availability. When, not if, a failure happens in the cloud your application needs intelligent recovery of the failed components; systems, application resources, infrastructure components and their dependencies. As an expert in availability, your software vendor has a breadth of knowledge baked into the application protection. In the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux product, wizard based automation using industry best practices, and a long history of application expertise drive clear automated recovery of applications in a failure scenario

3. For intelligent block level data replication for your application, increasing your resilience in the event of a system panic or datacenter outage

Application coverage and smart, balanced recovery is made possible when the data is available on the standby system in the event of a failure. When your HA vendor includes block level data replication, you are able to expand the failover resilience of your application beyond a single datacenter or region into multiple datacenters and regions. Block level data replication is also an effective way to avoid hardware values that impact cloud volumes in a single data center. One cloud incident involving a datacenter power and subsequent generator failure resulted in hardware damage and data loss for instances running in the single data center. Cloud does not mean that you are completely safe from all failures, and backups as well as highly available data replication copies is a must.

4. For a faster response mechanism for problem detection and resolution

Your HA software is the first line of defense for identifying and remediating application failures. With monitoring daemons, an application failure can be quickly detected and remediated by the software before users are critically impacted. In addition, your high availability software such as the SIOS Protection Suite for Linux solution includes configurable methods for sending and communicating alerts to administrators, event consoles, or dashboards which allows you to instantly and effectively communicate with key .

5. For an additional source of data that can be mined and audited to help predict the health and stability of your enterprise

Data is king. Your high availability software is a tremendous source of data and information about your environment that can be mined and audited. As your HA solution responds to application failures, infrastructure issues and latencies, and drives your uptime through transient failures their logs capture critical information on the health of your enterprise. As VP of Customer Experience, our Customer Success and Support team was able to use our HA logs to provide a health check up to a customer, informing them of several application issues and optimizations possible because of the captured log data.

6. For the balanced and truthful viewpoint, and supplemental wisdom needed for your enterprise

In addition to the value of the High Availability software, there is another reason why you still need HA software in the cloud. That additional reason is the balanced and truthful viewpoint and supplemental wisdom of your HA vendor’s development, services and customer experience teams. Your HA software is supported by a team of experts, experienced availability engineers, and most importantly a services and support team with years of best practice experience, application specific knowledge, and cross pollinated ideas and skills that can greatly benefit your enterprise.

7. For reduced planned maintenance downtime

Last but not least, your higher availability software helps reduce or possibly eliminate the downtime required for upgrades, minor patches, and rolling preventative maintenance. Utilizing your HA software’s switchover and failover capabilities, your standby server can be actively patched, updated, and tested then promoted to being the active availability node. Thereby ensuring that your critical systems are running on the latest releases while minimizing the penalty of upgrades.

Yes, the Cloud has added increased hardware and platform stability for applications, developers, and enterprise users, but if you’ve begun thinking that you don’t need high availability you are heading down a dark alley that ends in the despair of a late night of cold pizza putting applications back online, explaining the unexplainable, and contemplating dusting off resumes. So thanks for letting me jog your memory . . . You and your HA software need each other, even in the Cloud.

– Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How To Choose A Cloud When You Need High Availability

January 8, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How To Choose A Cloud When You Need High Availability

Understand the cloud market

A number of analyst firms are predicting an ever-increasing number of deployments of applications, databases, and solutions in the cloud. According to Gartner, firms are “moving to the cloud at an increasing rate.”^[1] In fact, Gartner and other analysts expect the pace of cloud migration and deployment will continue to accelerate, driven in large part by the pace of innovation in the cloud. In a TechTarget article by Kurt Marko, of MarkoInsights, Marko notes that the pace of innovation that is “being undertaken in the cloud likely can’t be replicated on premises due to the elastic, scalable, and on-demand nature of managed public cloud services.”

We see more and more companies that had been using the cloud only for DevOps applications and databases that were not essential to their business, are now moving mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases that require high availability protection to the cloud.

If you are considering a move to the cloud – and it seems likely that you are – there are several keys to understand when you need high availability.

Familiarize yourself with the cloud high availability options

To plan for the proper availability solution for a cloud or hybrid cloud deployment, consider what the pain points are with regards to both availability (99.9% uptime) and high availability (99.99% uptime). You also need to understand the options that are available for high availability with an eye towards your plans to migrate to the cloud. Notable analysts and experts suggest looking for solutions that will not only mitigate and reduce the pain of migrating your workloads, but will also provide a balanced and comprehensive approach to availability throughout the lifespan of your cloud architecture. Note, it is also wise to consider solutions that can provide protection and high availability for portions of your workload that may one day repatriate from the cloud back to your on-premises environment.

Here are ten things to consider when comparing your availability options in the cloud:

1. The deployment method. Is it possible to deploy the availability solution you are considering using an image, CLI, UI, or other repeatable solution such as cloud formation template or packaged scripts.

2. The system requirements. Most notably, consider the operating system (OS), disk, CPU, and memory requirements.

3. The deployment environments. Do your availability options support on-premises only, one or more public clouds, or can they support a mixture, and/or hybrid cloud deployment. Is there a SaaS offering available as well?

4. The breadth and depth of application protection. “Breadth” meaning what types of applications, databases, front-ends, networking, and infrastructure components can be protected? Is there a flexible framework for adding new applications and variants? “Depth” meaning – is the solution application-aware – and able to maintain application-specific best practices throughout the application failover/failback processes?

5. Performance requirements. We often think of RTO and RPO, but what about other performance needs of your solution. Will your availability solution cause performance issues on failover?

6. Resilience requirements. How large a cluster can the availability solution support?, How many faults and failures can it detect and recover from. How will replication be handled while keeping metadata in sync?

7. Supportability and maintenance. Does the availability vendor have experience with a wide range of availability needs and configurations? Do they have longevity, and a support system designed to address issues that may go beyond their solution? Can they help you minimize disruption and planned downtime during your system management and maintenance (patches, upgrades, and general maintenance).

8. Total cost of ownership. There are entire industries and services dedicated to helping you calculate the total cost of ownership, so we won’t cover that here. Suffice it to say, your calculations will be unique to your organization, cloud provider, applications, and IT team. You should consider whether your availability solution vendor can help you identify strategies for saving utilization, licensing, and other costs? Does the solution automate manual tasks, reduce IT labor time?

9. Licensing and pricing model. How do you consume the cost of the software? Is there a subscription fee, subscription model, pay-as-you-go offering, bring your own license (BYOL), or combination of flexible options. How will you enable the product licensing? Is there a license server, licensing service, or encrypted key based on virtual machine deployment details, such as address, hostname, MAC address.

10. The impact on IT staff. How much training with the solution require? How much manual intervention will be needed in the event of an application failure event or disaster? Will it require specialized scripting that needs to be maintained? Who will be responsible for ongoing maintenance?

Weigh the benefits and trade-offs

Like every important decision, you need to understand your tradeoffs and choose the best balance to meet your needs. For example, I recently asked a friend to recommend a good walking shoe. I bought a pair he raved about – noting how lightweight they were, how strong and durable the fabric, and how stylish they were. I went for my first long walk-run in them, and I donated my first pair of “one run” shoes immediately thereafter. When I went to ‘Fleet Feet’ to get an expert’s opinion I ended up with a heavier shoe, with more breathable fabric (also less durable), and an unrivaled level of hideousness. I made a tradeoff between appearance and function that worked for my needs and budget.

Like running shoes, there is no silver bullet solution that will be the right fit for every company, every application, every database, and every possible server and architecture. You are officially free to stop looking for it. Instead, settle into the activity of weighing the trade-offs to determine what is the right fit for your company’s needs. Think about your tradeoffs. For example, if you’re sure you will be a full Microsoft shop, the importance of GCP and AWS support should be a little lower in your evaluation process.

Take your IT infrastructure dynamics into account

Think holistically about availability in your entire IT infrastructure – both on premises and in the cloud. The reasons to do so are best explained with another analogy. In 2018, I was the coordinator for an outreach program feeding the homeless and hungry in Columbia, South Carolina. Our group met once a week to serve a meal and a message of hope to over 100 men, women and children. When we considered expanding – adding more days of the week, more hours, or additional services, we had to think well beyond simple scheduling requirements. Knowing that we were providing a critical service to clients who depend on us, we had to consider all the factors that affected our ability to deliver those services consistently for the long-term, such as: cost, ages of our team members, outside obligations, alternative methods to achieve our goals, risk factors, and other dynamics within our parent organization.

When you are choosing your solution, after you’ve understood the market, familiarized yourself with options, and weighed the trade-offs, the last step is to take into account the various other dynamics in your overall environment. Will the solution meet the needs of your business as a whole? Will your critical data be protected from loss? Will your end-user productivity be protected from downtime? What training will be required to move to the cloud and how will that impact your ability to manage or maintain the solution that you choose? What IT roles will be added, removed, or changed in your cloud journey? Will any responsibilities for application availability move to any line-of-business owners? And how will the shifts in responsibilities, or team make up improve or decrease your overall potential for success. Consider whether your team needs to take a step-by-step approach, migrating smaller workloads first.

As VP of Customer Experience, I have seen a wide range of cloud migrating planning – some straightforward others extremely disruptive. In one instance a customers’ move to the cloud was highly contentious because management saw it as an opportunity to eliminate an entire IT department. I’m not suggesting that you play politics, but you should be aware of all of the factors at play in these complex projects.

Migrating to the cloud is supposed to save money, time and resources while affording improvements in availability and resilience. Regardless of which cloud you choose, make sure that you consider these tips and select the corresponding availability solution that gives you the flexibility to deliver the protection you need in the configuration you want.

Learn more about cloud high availability options with SIOS.

– Cassius Rhue, VP of Customer Experience, SIOS

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Six Reasons Your Cloud Migration Has Stalled

December 22, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Six Reasons Your Cloud Migration Has Stalled

More and more customers are seeking to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability and performance of the cloud. As the number of applications, solutions, customers, and partners making the shift increases, be sure that your migration doesn’t stall.

Avoid the Following Six Reasons Cloud Migrations Stall

1. Incomplete cloud migration project plans

Project planning is widely thought to be a key contributor to project success. The planning plays an essential role in helping guide stakeholders, diverse implementation teams, and partners through the project phases. Planning helps identify desired goals, align resources and teams to those goals, reduce risks, avoid missed deadlines, and ultimately deliver a highly available solution in the cloud. Incomplete plans and incomplete planning are often a big cause of stalled projects. At the ninth hour a key dependency is identified. During an unexpected server reboot an application monitoring and HA hole is identified (see below). Be sure that your cloud migration has a plan, and work the plan.

2. Over-engineering on-premises

“This is how we did it on our on-premises nodes,” was the phrase that started a recent customer conversation. The customer engaged with Edmond Melkomian, Project Manager for SIOS Professional Services, when their attempts to migrate to the cloud stalled. During a discovery session, Edmond was able to uncover a number of over-engineered items related to on-premises versus cloud architecture. For some projects, reproducing what was done on premises can be a resume for bloat, complexity, and delays. Analyze your architecture and migration plans and ruthlessly eliminate over-engineered components and designs, especially with networking and storage.

3. Under-provisioning

Controlling cost and preventing sprawl are an important and critical aspect of cloud migrations. However, some customers, anxious about per hour charges and associated costs for disks and bandwidth fall into the trap of under-provisioning. In this trap, resources are improperly sized, be that disks that have the wrong speed characteristics, compute resources with the wrong CPU or memory footprint, or clusters with the wrong number of nodes. In such under-provisioned cases, issues arise when User Acceptance Test (UAT) begins and expected/anticipated workloads create a log jam on undersized resources. Or a cost optimization of a target node is unable to properly handle resources in a failover scenario. While resizing virtual machines in the cloud is a simple process, these sizing issues often create delays while architects and Chief Financial Officers try to understand the impact of re-provisioning resources.

4. Internal IT processes

Every great enterprise company has a set of internal processes, and chances are your team and company are no exception. IT processes are usually key among the processes that can have a large impact on the success of your cloud migration strategy. In the past, many companies had long requisition and acquisition processes, including bids, sizing guides, order approvals, server prep and configuration, and final deployment. The cloud process has dramatically altered the way compute, storage, and network resources, among others, are acquired and deployed. However, if your processes haven’t kept up with the speed of the cloud your migration may hit a snag when plans change.

5. Poor High Availability planning

Another reason that cloud migrations can stall involves high availability planning. High availability requires more than a bundle of tools or enterprise licenses. HA requires a careful, thorough and thoughtful system design. When deploying an HA solution your plan will need to consider capacity, redundancy, and the requirements for recovery and correction. With a plan, requirements are properly identified, solutions proposed, risks thought through, and dependencies for deployment and validation managed. Without a plan, the project and deployment are vulnerable to risks, single point of failure issues, poor fit, and missing layers and levels of application protection or recovery strategies. Often when there has been a lack of HA planning, projects stall while the requirements are sorted out.

6. Incomplete or invalid testing

Ron, a partner migrating his end customer to the cloud, planned to go-live over an upcoming three day weekend. The last decision point for ‘go/no-go’ was a batch of user acceptance testing on the staging servers. The first test failed. In order to make up for lost time due to other migration snags, Ron and team skipped over a number of test cases related to integrating the final collection of security and backup software on the latest OS with supporting patches. The simulated load, the first on the newly minted servers, tripped a series of issues within Ron’s architecture including a kernel bug, a CPU and memory provisioning issue, and storage layout and capacity issues. The project was delayed for more than four weeks to address customer confidence, proper testing and validation, resizing and architecture, and apply software and OS fixes.

The promises of the cloud are enticing, and a well planned cloud migration will position you and your team to take advantage of these benefits. Whether you are beginning or in the middle of a cloud migration, we hope this article helps you be more aware of common pitfalls so you can hopefully avoid them.

– Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

Reducing downtime for WordPress sites hosted on Amazon EC2

October 19, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Reducing downtime for WordPress sites hosted on Amazon EC2

Going from ignorance to bliss with SIOS AppKeeper

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) used by millions of companies to create websites, blogs, or apps. According to estimates, there are over 75 million websites today that use WordPress and many companies are beginning to host their WordPress instances on Amazon EC2. Users love WordPress for its flexibility and the ease with which you can create and modify layouts. If you are using WordPress for your website, then you are in good company.

With so many users relying on WordPress to power their websites, you can imagine that there is a rich set of third-party tools (plugins and services) designed to meet the needs of those users. Some of these plugins are to add security functionality, such as scanners to probe for vulnerabilities. Because more plugins can lead to more vulnerabilities.

Trust, but verify. Why monitoring WordPress uptime matters.

Deploying a website or application running on WordPress without monitoring it properly would be like leaving your car running outside with the keys in it. You’ll want to protect your investment. For companies managing WordPress sites (or any applications, for that matter), there are three primary reasons to monitor:

To understand the visitors and optimize their experience;
To monitor the speed of the site and ensure that it meets expected service level agreements (SLAs); and
To ensure that you maximize uptime. Downtime can mean (serious) lost revenue for any e-commerce sites running on WordPress.

You believe your WordPress site is working properly, but you really want to know what is going on. The goal of monitoring should be to know quickly what is going on and why, allowing you to respond quickly to any issues.

There is a wide range of tools available to help WordPress users monitor their sites. Some are very focused on WordPress, such as ManageWP and JetPack, while others are industry-standard solutions that apply to many different CMSs and applications. Some go “deep” and are focused on one element of monitoring, such as Google Analytics and its focus on visitor analytics, while others try to go “broad” and address all three key aspects of monitoring. What you decide to use depends on your budget, your requirements, and your technical capabilities.

Here at SIOS, we believe that the best of breed approach makes sense. We focus on monitoring applications and ensuring that our customers’ experience as little downtime as possible with those applications. Many of our customers are using SIOS AppKeeper today to monitor and protect their WordPress sites running on Amazon EC2.

SIOS AppKeeper – simple but powerful monitoring and automated remediation for WordPress sites

Many WordPress monitoring solutions (from free plugins to low-cost freemium services) will tell you when your WordPress site is down. And depending on the sophistication (and cost) of your monitoring solution, it may tell you why your WordPress site is down. But will it help you reduce downtime and automatically restart your services or reboot your instances when downtime is experienced?

Many companies host their WordPress sites on Amazon EC2 using either Apache or NGINX webservers. SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that can be configured to automatically discover WordPress sites or applications running on Amazon EC2 instances and their services, and then automatically take any number of actions if and when downtime is experienced. So instead of only getting alerts that something is wrong, you get notified that something happened and was automatically addressed.

Downtime matters. If you are running an e-commerce site using WordPress, then downtime will result in lost revenue. How much revenue? Simply divide your annual revenues by 365 days and 24 hours (Annual revenue/365/24) to understand your revenue per hour. In 2013 Google experienced a 5-minute outage that cost them $545,000 in revenue. Now, you may not be Google, but you certainly do want to eliminate downtime wherever possible.

Now imagine what happens when you receive an alert that your WordPress site is down. Are you ready to respond immediately? Do you know what should be addressed to get your WordPress site back up and running? According to our customer research, the average customer using only three Amazon EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month.

SIOS AppKeeper monitors Amazon EC2 and alerts you to any downtime AND takes action to remediate the situation, by either restarting your Amazon EC2 services or rebooting your instances.

AppKeeper addresses over 85% of our customers’ Amazon EC2 downtime issues automatically. This means that you get notified that a failure was identified and addressed, without you having to drop everything or lose any significant revenue.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Video: Installing AppKeeper and recovering from AWS EC2 failures Demo

And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper. AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance per month.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS