Managed IT services providers recommend virtualization not because it is an IT business trend that everyone simply must ride, but because it is, quite, a smart way of managing your IT resources. Every day, more and more organizations migrate to the Amazon Web Services public cloud. However, despite the cloud's benefits in scalability, agility and efficiency, they discover a new set of challenges that need to be overcome.

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Gartner estimates that more than 50 percent of enterprises will have adopted a hybrid cloud approach by this year. Transitioning from a traditional on premise IT infrastructure to a public cloud can be overwhelming and success requires a different mindset and range of skills. Here are a few points that you should consider when in moving to the AWS cloud.

1. Preparation for migration: Some points that you need to consider when preparing for the large scale migration are - if everyone within the organization on board with this major move? Are your employees adequately equipped with knowledge about the cloud? And, since large-scale transfers involve big data, would your security framework be able to deal with potential security threats during the transition? Can your company handle the inevitable expenditure that goes with investing in the cloud?

2. Reasons for migration: You as a business owner, should have a clear understanding of the reason for migrating to the cloud and the importance of it. The most compelling reason is the need to meet your business's increasing demand for efficiency, that would lead to greater profitability. Other reasons could include change of organizational leadership or a shift in business structure that necessitates storage recalibration.

3. Cloud Finances: Different organizations have different financial approaches, and their choices of IT infrastructure reflect this fact. For some, the on-premise approach of making a large, upfront capital expenditure to purchase infrastructure and then capitalizing the investment over time may be the favorable option because they prefer to keep complete control over their IT environment. However, for others, a heavy initial expense is not ideal, so a cloud approach with only ongoing, operational costs is more fitting. This option may be particularly suitable for organizations with fluctuating needs on a monthly basis, as an on-premises data center will not offer them the flexibility they require. Regardless of the approach, it is important to compare the respective costs before deciding which one is most suitable. The best option may be to combine both on-premise and cloud to create a hybrid cloud environment. This will allow for steady workloads to be kept onsite while bursts in demand can be processed by an on-demand, public cloud.

4. Security and Availability: The idea of handing over all of your data to a public cloud provider can be a daunting because of the obvious security and availability concerns. However, public cloud providers must adhere to strict compliance protocols and can implement and maintain much higher security levels than on-premise installations because they have more available resources.

5. Migration requirements: While migrating to the cloud you need to have every tiny details in place like, which specific data, servers, or applications need to be migrated? Does your company need large-scale migration, or can it survive on moving only a small part of your resources to the cloud? Perhaps, a subsidiary could survive without having to be moved to the cloud.

6. Beware of Staff Apprehension: Any dramatic change within an IT environment will face staff apprehension. You might expect the shift to be met with resistance from corporate management, but the real doubts will come from your IT team. After working with on-premise infrastructure for years, administrators will not welcome any changes they think could jeopardize their jobs. Help your team embrace this shift by making sure they receive suitable training to prepare them for a new set of challenges.

7. Log Analysis and Metric Collection: Organizations moving to AWS suddenly find themselves managing a highly scalable and highly dynamic environment that requires a new type of log analytics and metric collection. The need for centralization of data is crucial in dynamic environments because often you find yourself trying to troubleshoot a problem on servers that no longer exist.

8. Impact to aws managed services provider the business: Temporary downtime is something you have to be ready for. You might need more time or you might need to consider alternatives for the brief interruptions that come with migration, and of course budget can be a major factor in your decision to move. You can save your business from unnecessary obstacles by first assessing its ability to handle these situations.

AWS is the preferable public (IaaS) cloud choice for enterprises today, and it looks set to stay this way. To achieve a successful transition during a migration of workloads and products to AWS, the process needs to be carefully planned and implemented in a step-by-step fashion that will prove the benefits of the move to all of the stakeholders.

Today, there is a buzz all around about Docker and containerisation in general. What exactly is Docker and how is it related to containerisation? What are the top benefits of using docker? Why did it became so popular? In this article I will answer all these questions as well as give you a few statistics and some successful case studies related to Docker that are nice to know about.

What is docker & how is it related to containerization

Running applications in containers instead of virtual machines is gaining momentum in the IT world. The technology is considered to be one of the fastest growing in recent the history of the software industry. At its heart lies Docker, a platform that allows users to easily pack, distribute and manage applications within containers. In other words, It is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers.

Docker really makes it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. And containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package. By doing so, the developer can be assured that the application will run on any other Linux machine regardless of any customized settings that machine might have that could differ from the machine used for writing and testing the code.

Docker; statistics & facts

Why do large companies like ING, PayPal, ADP and Spotify keep using Docker? Why is the adoption of docker growing so fast? Let's go over the top advantages of docker to better understand it.

1. Return on investment & cost savings

The first advantage of using docker is the ROI. The biggest driver of most management decisions when selecting a new product is the return on investment. The more a solution can drive down costs while raising profits, the better the solution is, especially for large, established companies, that need to generate steady revenue on the long term.

In this sense, Docker can help facilitate this type of savings by dramatically reducing infrastructure resources. The nature of Docker is that fewer resources are necessary to run the same application. Because of the reduced infrastructure requirements that Docker has, organizations are able to save on everything from server costs to the employees needed to maintain them. Docker allows engineering teams to be smaller and more effective.

2. Standardization & productivity

Docker containers ensure consistency across multiple development, release cycles and standardising your environment. One of the biggest advantages to a Docker-based architecture is actually standardization. Docker provides repeatable development, build, test, and production environments. Standardizing service infrastructure across the entire pipeline allows every team member to work on a production parity environment. By doing this, engineers are more equipped to efficiently analyze and fix bugs within the application. This reduces the amount of time wasted on defects and increases the amount of time available for feature development.

As we mentioned, Docker containers allow you to commit changes to your Docker images and version control them. For example if you perform a component upgrade that breaks your whole environment, it is very easy to rollback to a previous version of your Docker image. This whole process can be tested in a few minutes. Docker is fast, allowing you to quickly make replications and achieve redundancy. Also, launching Docker images is as fast as running a machine process.

3. CI efficiency

Docker enables you to build a container image and use that same image across every step of the deployment process. A huge benefit of this is the ability to separate non-dependent steps and run them in parallel. The length of time it takes from build to production can be sped up notably.

4. Compatibility & maintainability

Eliminate the "it works on my machine" problem once and for all. One of the benefits that the entire team will appreciate is parity. Parity, in terms of Docker, means that your images run the same no matter which server or whose laptop they are running on. For your developers, this means less time spent setting up environments, debugging environment-specific issues, and a more portable and easy-to-set-up codebase. Parity also means your production infrastructure will be more reliable and easier to maintain.

5. Simplicity & faster configurations

One of the key benefits of Docker is the way it simplifies matters. Users can take their own configuration, put it into code and deploy it without any problems. As Docker can