As applications are being moved to the cloud en masse, management, and maintenance of these applications in a complex cloud environment pose a critical challenge. Flexibility and scalability provided by cloud platforms again turn out to be a double-edged sword: Without adequate maintenance strategies, cloud applications can rapidly turn out to be cumbersome to manage, slow to perform, and costly to run. Good cloud application maintenance ensures that time goes by without cloud-based systems becoming sluggish, insecure, and expensive.
In this article, we are going to discuss best practices for maintaining cloud applications. Specifically, we are going to think about how you can use cloud-native app support to help businesses optimize the maintenance of cloud apps while meeting their operating requirements.
One of the most basic requirements of effective cloud application maintenance is proactive monitoring. Cloud environments are very dynamic, and if anything happens minor, it can suddenly turn out to be huge without early detection. Cloud applications ensure you get real-time information about any kind of performance degradation or security vulnerabilities and system failures.
Business companies would install automated alerts and monitoring tools to monitor key metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, and network traffic. Such metrics alert IT teams to abnormal behavior before it has an impact on their end users. They would be useful using AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud’s Operations Suite to gain greater insight into just how cloud apps are performing while allowing the team to act immediately.
Best Practice Tip: Customize alerts for individual thresholds. For example, you would be alerted when the response times from applications have exceeded a threshold or when storage thresholds within your data have maxed out.
Depending on the application, cloud applications depend on several different software components, like operating systems, databases, and third-party services. The installation of all of these various components minimizes your risks of security and generally improves your performance. In the maintenance of cloud apps, these components must be updated periodically to ensure these applications stay as secure and efficient as possible.
Software providers regularly push out updates and patches to correct software bugs repair security vulnerabilities or improve the performance of their products.
Best Practice Tip: Implement an automated patch management process so that all updates will be automatically applied the same day they become available. Additionally, test all updates first in a staging environment before any deployment to production systems to avoid sudden surprises.
Applications deployed on cloud platforms have pay-as-you-go models, meaning that cost grows with usage, which is a direct tie of resource management with operational cost. Poor oversight can result in businesses quickly running over budget using cloud resources. As part of maintenance for cloud applications, there should be constant checks to make sure resources such as compute instances, storage, and databases are being optimally used.
Some common ones are auto-scaling which automatically adjusts the number of running instances to the requirement. This will help in avoiding over-provisioning when there is a low request for their traffic and ensures a respectable provision of resources during high-traffic times. Unused or underutilized resources are also regularly reviewed and removed or downsized to ensure business optimization.
Best Practice Tip: Leverage cloud cost management tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management to monitor expensed patterns and identify ways to decrease costs for optimal resource use.
In addition to such high-level views, sufficient plans for backing up and disaster recovery are vital to ensure that applications in the cloud survive business disruptions through data loss, system failure, or security breaches. Automated backups are hence a core function under cloud-native app support, ensuring data is constantly being protected and restored readily as required.
Implement policies that include the regular snapshot of critical data, redundant storage across multiple regions, and encryption to protect sensitive information in designing your backup strategy. From the disaster recovery standpoint, ensure that your application can quickly be restored within the shortest time possible to minimize downtime and potential data loss.
Best Practice Tip: Regular disaster recovery drills must be undertaken for testing the recovery plan, and your team’s actions during an emergency. Additionally, consider that backups are successful by testing data restores at regular intervals.
Security is one of the biggest barriers in the maintenance of cloud apps, particularly as more sophisticated attacks pour from all directions. Multi-tenant infrastructures; dispersed data across geographies; and many other areas make cloud environments more vulnerable. A strong security strategy is hence the key to securing your applications and data.
Regular security audits, vulnerability scans, and penetration testing help identify potential risks. Best practice security includes encryption of data in transit and at rest as well as IAM policies, with consideration for MFA for users using cloud applications.
Best Practice Tip: Be aware of the industry-specific compliances, for example, GDPR, and HIPAA, and then make sure your cloud application is compliant with the same. The leading cloud providers generally provide built-in features that help businesses adhere to compliance and security norms.
Many cloud platforms offer cloud-native app support designed to enhance performance, reliability, and scalability with the aim of high-performance and scalable cloud applications. The services are optimized for a cloud environment; therefore, maintaining the entire thing becomes that much easier.
For example, managed databases, serverless computing, and container orchestration with Kubernetes can greatly reduce the number of intervening steps. These services can handle many of the operational tasks associated with scaling, patching, and performance tuning, allowing your IT team to focus on higher-value activities.
Best Practice Tip: Wherever possible, use cloud-native services to avoid operational overhead. For example, serverless functions such as AWS Lambda automatically scale on demand, but the underlying infrastructural management is also automatically handled and not in your hands.
Since very effective cloud application maintenance requires proper processes and knowledge sharing across teams, well-documented solutions on maintenance procedures, monitoring configurations, recovery plans, and security policies are required because of the increasingly complex nature of cloud environments.
This will also serve as a guide for the IT teams in solving problems or adjusting the configuration of the cloud environment. It will ensure the knowledge being passed down through the team and, therefore, eliminate any possibility of failure resulting from staff change or limited prowess.
Best Practice Tip: Utilize collaborative tools, such as Confluence, GitHub, or an internal wiki, to document and share knowledge about your cloud applications in a collective knowledge repository. Ensure that the documentation is kept current and reflects any changes in your infrastructure or application architecture.
Regular reviews of performance should be conducted to ensure that your cloud applications continue to deliver in meeting business goals. This should include critical performance indicators such as response times from the application, uptime, and user satisfaction.
Regular performance reviews will aid in tracking bottlenecks, time trends, and informed decisions that drive further improvements in the performance of your application. Early critical alerts about these potential problems also help ensure your cloud application remains aligned with business goals.
Best Practice Tip: Agree to a review of cloud metrics taken quarterly by your development and operations teams to discuss emerging concerns.
Virstack specializes in holistic cloud application maintenance services. We ensure a company’s environments are completely managed and optimized for high performance, security, and cost efficiency. Our cloud-native app support makes it possible for companies to implement the best practices of monitoring, automation, and scalability, thereby innovating while we manage the rest.
Only with a proactive strategic approach do applications remain healthy in complex cloud environments. Continuous monitoring, regular updates, optimized management of resources, and using cloud-native app support are all best practices needed to make any cloud applications reliable, secure, and cost-effective. As cloud technology continues changing, a good maintenance strategy would hold true for optimization of the returns on your cloud investment.