As more of us move infrastructure to the cloud we come up against an age old IT problem, how do we know if we are getting the best from our cloud investment, we have deployed it following best practice, we have optimised its performance and increasingly have we secured our infrastructure in the way we need too?
These queries are not new to cloud infrastructure, these are challenges we have whenever and wherever we deploy infrastructure and applications. However, one thing that cloud does allow us to do is to look at an extremely wide body of evidence, literally 1000’s of deployments of applications to determine their optimal configuration for performance and security.
How do we get that kind of information and how do we use the metrics available to us to make sure we are following the best practice when utilising cloud services and infrastructure? Today we are starting to see a range of companies developing platforms to aggregate together this information and provide actionable insights that we can all use, one such company who are excelling in this space is Sumo Logic and this week I’m joined by Christian Beedgen, their Co-Founder and CTO as we discuss how to baseline cloud infrastructure.
We start our discussion looking at differing cloud adoption attitudes both around the world as well as looking at how companies “born in the cloud” differ from those moving to it, we also ask why the UK and Germany are more sceptical about cloud adoption than most!
We explore the idea of turning the datacentre into an API and what that means for those with more traditional skills and why we need to be sensitive to concerns they may have. Christian also provides some insight into why an anti-cloud stance could be a long-term problem although we also discuss why there isn’t necessarily a wrong answer to if and how you make a move to the public cloud.
We then take a look at the challenges of baselining our technology and finding ways to compare our deployment to accepted best practices, we discuss the issues of the “firehose” problem when it comes to looking at baseline data and how to pick our way through it.
In the final part of our chat we look at the work Sumo Logic is doing with AWS’s GuardDuty threat intelligence platform and how they are trying to bring clarity to the breadth of information it can provide.
We wrap up looking at the future and the part that intelligent monitoring that uses the aggregated information we can get from the cloud, can play a powerful part in the future of how we deliver IT.
Sumo Logic are on an interesting journey and it will be fascinating to see how they further develop their model of providing insight to their customers allowing them to get the best from infrastructure deployments ensuring they are efficient, effective and secure.
To find out more about them visit sumologic.com and you can also follow Christian on twitter @raychaser
Thanks for listening.
Techstringy 