Software and infrastructure are increasingly provided from the cloud, which is more convenient and cheaper than deploying your own infrastructure, especially for small organizations. Although there are certain risks associated with the clouds, a professional enterprise app development company will manage to mitigate them following the best practices.
Join SwagSoft sharing their experience of building a cloud-based platform for Danone.
Case Study
When sharing physical resources in cloud infrastructure, security and confidentiality of data is required, which cannot be guaranteed due to the physical separation of machines or networks. The key to success here is focusing on specific scenarios for the use of cloud services based on practical economic incentives for service providers and consumers.
SwagSoft has successfully developed a cloud-based platform for Danone that provides a possibility for its business units from all around the world to cooperate safely and easily. The application named NutreBase solves several urgent problems of the enterprise.
Before acquiring a cloud-based solution, Danone used stand-alone Excel files to share information between the teams, which significantly complicated the process of global collaboration for its business units. In addition, the process was extremely prone to error as data entry and verification were manual.
Nutrebase developed by SwagSoft allows real-time synchronization and automatic verification of data in different countries. This allows effective and efficient work of the global enterprise.
So far, the platform has brought great results for the company. To date, it has been tested in 5 different countries with 3,000 products registered on the platform. It is set to be used at all Danone headquarters over the next 1 year with a central repository of at least 27,000 products for 3 years.
The Challenges of Developing Cloud Platforms
In cloud environments, enterprise team manageability is an especially important quality. Compared to traditional systems, achieving a high level of manageability in cloud ecosystems is complicated by three factors:
- limited human intervention
- significant variation in the range of workloads
- variety of shared infrastructures.
In the vast majority of cases, there will be no database or system administrators who could help developers with the creation of applications based on cloud services; administration of platforms will mainly be done automatically. It is difficult to tune such systems to accommodate mixed workloads, which inevitably cause issues in team management.
Over time, the workload of even the same user can change significantly. This is why the scalability of cloud services benefits users whose need in resources for work may fluctuate. Moreover, the ability to configure services depends on the virtualization technique in the shared infrastructure. This requires a review of the traditional roles and responsibilities for multi-level resource management.
Best Practices for Moving to the Cloud
The cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and adaptability of clouds are now fully realized in the app industry and enterprises are encouraged to migrate from legacy systems. Still, to use all the capabilities of clouds, you have to familiarize yourself with the possible difficulties it may trigger. Here are a few recommendations that will help to implement the migration to the cloud:
Elastic Architecture. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) scales according to user requirements, and the cloud gives more options in this regard than the classic vertical and horizontal scaling. To fully realize their potential, systems and apps should be designed as independent of each other as possible, basing on the service structure and message chains.
Design for Failure. The main design tasks are ensuring duplication and fault tolerance. For business continuity, in addition to implementing a well-thought-out backup strategy, care must be taken to ensure that the system is ready for restarts. It is imperative to automate the deployment procedure, which requires configuration and server scripts creation. Such automation demands the development of new practices, constant integration, test-oriented application improvement, etc.
Performance. It is necessary to remember the limitations of the selected technology in terms of productivity. In a multi-tenant environment, the activity of “neighbors” of your virtual machine can influence its velocity – a jump in load can degrade the availability of resources, reducing the speed of computing systems. The chosen architecture must cope with these problems.
Monitoring. The ease of using extra resources in the cloud allows you to quickly raise the number of servers. However, with an increase in their number, administrative difficulties arise, in the overcoming of which monitoring tools play an important role (these are involved in automatic scaling which is carried out periodically and after certain events). They are also part of systems that provide reliable architecture. In addition, monitoring tools help in detecting security flaws that can make your app risky.
Final Word
The rapid development of the IT industry provides companies with a huge number of opportunities to store their data on servers that are located remotely. Cloud data technologies have found their application in businesses of all kinds of activities becoming one of the main trends of the mobile app development industry. They are actively improving due to the constant increase in the amount of information that needs to be stored or transmitted.
If you decided to build a cloud-based platform and want everything to be done at the highest level, SwagSoft suits your needs perfectly! We are an app development company located in Singapore that strives to create and promote top-notch technology. Our team of professionals always seek novel and complicated tasks. Allow us to take your business ideas to a new level and realize them in a successful and futuristic way.