Cloud infrastructure engineering has emerged as the backbone of every technology startup, as it offers on-demand infrastructure scalability and flexibility.
But you need to hire a skilled cloud engineer to manage cloud infrastructure effectively; he must have the right skills and expertise to design the cloud architecture of multiple entities, network design, smooth production operations, and ensure security from internal and external threats.
Cloud engineers can also cultivate a culture of open communication, ensuring that all necessary stakeholders are aware of potential risks, and incident response plans. In this article, we will strive to understand how cloud engineers can manage cloud infrastructure operations and drive Technology transformation.
Cloud Technology Architecture and Design
A cloud architect can study entire technology operations, network flows on compute services, application services, web services, Object storage, database services, application scalability, cloud cost, and disaster recovery plans.
Once the existing infrastructure posture assessment drive is completed, they can advise you on choosing the appropriate cloud service models, such as distributing workloads across multiple availability zones, Managed database services, fault tolerance models to increase availability, Infrastructure as a Service, serverless technology implementation, fully automated CICD deployment models, and use automated incident management software to increase efficiency.
Cloud Automation
Cloud Automation is the latest trend in cloud infrastructure management. Cloud engineers may use custom Python scripts, Serverless, CICD pipeline production incident response automation, and automation tools to automate repeated manual operational tasks.
This will not only reduce the risk of human error but also ensures consistency and ensures that overall production remains incident-free and operational.
A cloud engineer can implement automation tools, configuration management tools, and IaC frameworks such as Terraform and Ansible to provision, configure, and manage resources programmatically. Cloud automation can ensure consistency and reduce human errors.
Automated Scaling and Elasticity
Cloud engineers need to introduce on-demand auto-scaling so that as traffic increases, additional resources are automatically provisioned to accommodate the load. Conversely, when demand decreases, extra resources can be de-provisioned.
This horizontal autoscaling will help reduce the risk of performance-related incidents. Cloud engineers in India use their skills to implement autoscaling with load balancing in existing systems that enable built-in failover mechanisms and high availability.
Driving Cloud Cost Optimization Drive
Cloud infrastructure costs can rise quickly if engineering management does not implement effective technical and functional cost control policies.
Cloud engineers can help you implement technical aspects; they should understand compute service usage patterns, data transfer costs, and object storage usages and identify opportunities to implement Serverless, Docker, Kubernetes, or on-demand service usage technology when needed via API calls.
A cost optimization drive might involve rightsizing instances, infrastructure reconsolidation, utilizing spot instances, applying storage data transition lifecycle policies, adopting server-less architectures, and implementing daily cloud usage notifications to take proactive actions.
Infrastructure Monitoring and Observability
Monitoring is a key part of infrastructure management to identify potential issues proactively and monitor application service performance.
A cloud engineer has to do an ample amount of research to find the right monitoring tools for some of the following business cases: infrastructure system-level monitoring, application services and performance monitoring, IT hardware monitoring, container platform monitoring, Real-time Visibility, and many more.
Monitoring rules are usually divided into two parts: system-level and application-level. Usually, system-level monitoring rules are applied immediately after a new instance launches by configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, and Salt.
Each alert must be appropriately classified with warning and critical tags and associated with the right escalation rule so that corrective measures can be taken to proactively address the issues.
As businesses grow, monitoring remains an essential element that ensures operational excellence and the ability to respond swiftly to anticipated technical issues.
DevOps CICD pipeline transformation
A cloud engineer will transform DevOps Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines with test automation, code deployment planning to various stages such as staging and production, tracking pipeline performance and detecting anomalies, rollback mechanisms to revert to a previous stable state, and a blue or green pipeline.
A cloud engineer will also evaluate existing static web applications and explore the possibility of migrating them to Kubernetes. Cloud engineers can also adopt the latest automated infrastructure deployment methods, such as Terraform, AWS Cloudformation, and Ansible.
Cloud Infrastructure Security
Cloud infrastructure security is paramount for every technology company to protect sensitive data and critical assets, maintain government compliance, and restrict unauthorized access to infrastructure.
The cloud engineer should build a watertight strategy to secure infrastructure, the application layer, object storage, and critical assets.
The public cloud offers an ample amount of cloud security services that can secure an environment that mitigates operation risk, secure code deployment, proactive threat detection, logging and monitoring systems to detect suspicious activities, and safeguard publicly exposed web service operations.
