Engineering cloud-based technological infrastructure

Abstract

In the last decade cloud development has grown exponentially and increasingly companies and institutions decide to make the leap and provide their solutions into a cloud platform. This is mainly because of the evident benefits of using cloud-based solutions like high availability, scalability or redundancy, which are impossible or too much costly to be achieved on-premises. Cloud platforms may reduce considerably the costs and difficulty of maintenance, while offering flexible solutions to each need (Talukder and Zimmerman in Computing. computer communications and networks. Springer, London, 2010 [1]). Enterprises have a lot of services available to their needs, some of them very basic like a database, a web site or storage, but also many other advanced services for business intelligence, big data, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. However, from the architectural point of view, cloud-based solutions suppose some challenges not existing in traditional on-premises solutions that must be tackled during the engineering process. Whether a monolithic application may fit well on-premises, cloud environments work better with modularization and separation of services. This separation and distribution of services requires additional work to define communications between components and provide security techniques to guarantee data protection against potential risks like data loss, privacy breaks, unwanted access, etc. (Ghaffari et al. in 2016 8th international symposium on telecommunications (IST). IEEE, pp 105–110, 2016 [2]). Performance is also critical in cloud-based solutions, especially when services are located in different nodes on the internet. All these concerns suppose a quite big learning curve to the technical team that prevents some enterprises to move to cloud, especially when they try to migrate already existing solutions. This chapter discusses about the ins and outs of engineering a cloud-based solution applied to a real use case.