Microsoft Azure provides a scalable public cloud platform with a substantial range of different Virtual Machine configurations that enable it to be used to host many...
Azure Scalability: Designing Azure cloud infrastructure to scale
Azure Scalability
Scalability specifically in Azure is one of the most important aspects of cloud planning, and yet it is regularly overlooked.
The reason behind this is often the temptation to use an out-of-the-box Azure solution wizard that may appear at first glance to provide an easy answer to creating a scalable Azure environment, however, if you sit down with a cloud expert to professionally plan your architecture, you quickly realise that opting for the out-of-the-box method could never prompt the kind of questions an expert can and as a result will not necessarily meet the original goals that were set out – someone else’s design is a compromise to your needs.
When planning a cloud environment, scalability should be one of the first things you consider – because your needs will change over time – whether this is in terms of increasing customer or user numbers, or the growth of data that all businesses see over time. If it isn’t a consideration, you could easily plan a solution that is OK today, but insufficient tomorrow.
In the same way that physical hardware needs to scale, cloud architecture needs the same flexibility. Flexibility isn’t built into Azure or AWS, it needs to be designed into your deployment. You need to consider multiple areas and build them into the architecture – these considerations include the aforementioned storage growth and licenses, but also location, compute power and performance requirements.
In addition to these longer term, strategic planning needs, there are also demand-led factors such as business seasonality and even intra-day requirements for accessing information that needs to be met. These business changes will inevitably impact cloud requirements.
How do you plan for the unknown?
The answer is to design a solution with architecture that can scale in Azure without costing more than it should or impacting on performance and in order to achieve that takes experience-there are no two ways about it. Azure scalability is rarely linear, and in reality, it is stepped, so understanding how and when to scale can have a large impact on cost performance and cost.
By speaking to an expert at the start of your cloud journey and taking the time to plan, you will need to invest in a workshop, but this cost will be minimal compared to what money you might waste with a badly planned solution – in fact at IG CloudOps we have regularly reviewed existing solutions used by our clients and been able to reduce costs by up to 30% – which can be a five-figure saving for large, complex cloud deployments.
Why choose IG CloudOps
Our cloud service speaks for itself through the longevity of our customer base. Our cloud team have an intimate knowledge of the Azure and AWS landscape and pricing models.
As a Microsoft Gold Cloud Partner and Amazon AWS Partner, we’re able to advise customers on the best choices for them and help them stay ahead of their competitors with the best performance and service.
We’ll ensure you receive the scalability, performance, and availability you need with the resilience in place to back up your business.
Our cloud team provide a full range of services to help you achieve your business objectives in the cloud whichever platform works best for your needs.
- Forecasting usage
- Migrations for AWS & Migrations for Azure
- New architecture and consultancy
- Manage your workloads in the cloud
- Bring stability to your cloud pricing
- Security hardening of your cloud infrastructure
Our CloudOps provides detailed financial and usage information about your deployment that can be used to determine whether there are opportunities to reduce costs and improve efficiency. If you would like to talk to one of our certified experts about how we can help you protect your cloud investment contact us for more information
CloudOps has been specifically developed to:
- Support the delivery of business critical services and applications in the cloud
- Enhance your own services and teams with additional resources and skills
- Maximise the performance and manage costs of cloud operations
- Provide proactive support and management of your cloud
Speak to a member of our Azure team today.
Or book a test drive and find out how CloudOps can help your team manage the cloud.
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