Infrastructure has always been the backbone of every organization, which has made it more important than ever to address the importance of challenges being faced by Operations & Infrastructure leaders.

The evolution of remote work has caused the I&O leaders and their respective teams to create, deploy and secure dynamic environments quickly. Let us take a closer look at the major problems that enterprises and organizations are facing today.

What are the various challenges faced by companies and their respective proposed solutions?

1. Successfully addressing insufficient employee skill sets and availability of resources

   There is a shortage of the right skilled workforce and the availability in finding talented resources is a critical issue that most organizations are dealing with and will continue to be a challenge going forward.Not only is it important to identify versatile employees but also to develop their skills by investing in their training, certifications, classroom & corporate workshops, and providing work-life flexibility.

   As an enterprise, you can start this process with the following steps:

   • Conducting an inventory check of the necessary skills that are required for future roles and assessing the current staff.
   • Investing in a skills transformation program by creating a three to five-year roadmap of skills that are needed for future I&O and business requirements.
   • Focusing on emerging skills that promote digital dexterity, problem-solving and effective collaboration.
   • Implementing a prioritized set of methods to change the skills portfolio of the I&O within the organization.
   • Devoting a specific budget amount (recommended is 20-25%) from the training and development’s overall budget for upgrading the team’s skills beyond the current needs of the enterprise.
   • Accelerating the decommissioning of skills by prioritizing I&O skills that are based on future needs.
   • Exploring and establishing alternative training methods by emphasizing connected learning, immersive experiences, and greater collaboration amongst team members.
2. Managing Technical Debt
   • For most enterprises, technical debt is an ongoing challenge that hampers innovation efforts and your organization needs to have a plan to mitigate the same.
   • Having a mandatory short & long-term plan and its execution needs to be closely supervised by the respective stakeholders of the enterprise.
   • Successful execution of a plan allows to free up resources for innovation that helps in fostering a culture of agility and ultimately increasing the overall ROI of the organization.
3. Lowering the overall infrastructure costs

   Through both tactical and strategic approaches, it is possible to contain the expenses incurred during infrastructure setup. Let’s look at some of the ways to achieve this objective as mentioned below

   • Work closely with sourcing vendors and service providers to negotiate better deals for the enterprise. The focus should be on mission-critical areas.
   • Accelerate the adoption of the cloud and successful implementation of automation culture throughout the organization.
4. Improving the overall quality
   • Migrating to platform ops can help you bridge the gap between DevOps and the infrastructure team.
   • It will allow the development team the freedom to develop and be agile without the need for infrastructure and security experts.
   • This will also allow the infrastructure team to have control of security, cost, and compliance as a low-risk solution without the need for application experts.

What is CloudOps and the various technologies that it can work with?

CloudOps is a tool that can help you set up multiple technologies in a short period of time thereby eliminating the need for expert skillsets. At Ashnik, we provide multiple technologies that can be deployed across various platforms on the cloud such as AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, GCP, and on-premise as well.

This helps the customers to migrate and build up the infrastructure with ease along with monitoring of the same. The maintenance of the cluster, moving the single node cluster to the multi-node cluster and vice-versa can all be done with the help of this single tool.

This tool being containerized can be deployed in your environment and offers the following technologies:

• Postgres (Community)
• Enterprise DB
• MongoDB
• Apache Kafka
• Elasticsearch

What are the features of the CloudOps tool?

Here is a list of all the features of the CloudOps tool:

• Installation
• The versions being supported are 11,12,13,14
• The OS flavors being supported are Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, Rocky Linux
• Streaming Replication or Stand Alone
• It is supported for Cloud (AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, etc) or Virtual Machines
• It has got custom path installation
• It has got synchronous or asynchronous Installation
• The installation was done in the user environment
• It has got Postgres according to the version the user selects
• It has got Pgbouncer – For connection Pooling
• It has got Pgbadger – For offline Health check reports
• It has Monitoring Solutions like Prometheus and Grafana including dashboards
• High Availability & Backup
• Cloning & upgrade
• Maintenance jobs
• It has got a complete monitoring solution for database

What are the monitoring features of the CloudOps tool?

• Real-time monitoring with easy RBAC options
• Real-time dashboards like the statistics dashboards

Here’s the diagram of what the Cloud Ops tool architecture would look like:

Let us look at the inputs that the Statistics dashboard provides :

The statistics dashboard provides a wide range of different inputs and metrics that you can know about. Some of the metrics that are obtained through the dashboard are:

• Settings like Version, Max Connections, Shared Buffers, Effective Cache, Maintenance Work Memory, Work Memory, Max WAL Size, Random Page Cost, Seq Page Cost, and Max Worker Processes.
• Connection or Transaction Statistics like Connections, Transactions, Read Stats, Change Stats, Longest Transaction & Cache Hit Rate.
• Miscellaneous like Buffers (bg writer), Conflicts or Deadlocks, Lock Tables, Temp Files, Checkpoint Statistics.
• Database Dashboard with metrics like general counters, CPU, Memory, and File Descriptor Stats.
• The max parallel database stats that are obtained are active sessions, transactions, updated data, fetch data (SELECT), insert data, lock tables, return data, idle sessions, delete data, cache hit rate, buffers (bgwriter), conflicts or deadlocks and temp file (bytes).
• You will receive both custom alerts and pre-defined alerts, along with historical data for further diagnosis, centralized monitoring for a complete database landscape, and proactive alerting with the help of custom dashboards.

We hope this article has helped you to get a better understanding of how crucial the CloudOps tool is for critical business challenges being faced by your enterprise.

Sharing some more customer scenarios and success stories of open source, please check out the case studies mentioned below:

> How an Infrastructure Log Monitoring platform designed using ELK for a leading Bank in Asia helped the bank get a centralized view of their container platforms across multiple data centers.

> Open source technologies provide superior customer experience to an Insurance giant in Indonesia, helping it win new customers through a successful mobile application.

> An intelligent infrastructure monitoring platform built by Ashnik for a Fortune 500 Fintech company helped reduce customer onboarding time, and better SLAs for business-critical workloads cost-efficiently.

> How a real-time solution to enhance the customer experience helped a major Indian bank improve their overall performance through increased replica shards, and fixed the timeout issue faced earlier.

If you are looking to get subscriptions, support, or services for open source technologies, talk to Ashnik – a leading open source solutions company in Southeast Asia and India, offering a full-fledged open source technology marketplace, support, solutions, and services for consulting, managed, technical, training and more. Get in touch today!