Today, most of the cloud conversations with customers have shifted from “Should we move it to the cloud?” to “How can we move it to Cloud?” Everyone wants to leverage cloud as a platform and keen to start or accelerate their journey.
The ‘How’ discussion primarily revolves around three key concerns:

• How to roll out applications faster and have flexibility of scale-up, scale-out or scale-down.
• How to take advantage of cloud as platform to reduce time-to-market
• How to have better resiliency in IT infrastructure

With above concerns, discussions are shifting from ‘private’ or ‘public’ cloud debate and now include hybrid cloud approach too. Scale of adoption and security of public clouds are other areas of discussion. There is lot of focus on what it would take to adopt cloud for majority of applications and not just for a small share of workload.
Security and compliance are very critical and non-negotiable for almost all enterprise customers. Security and compliance not seen as limiting factors in adoption of cloud as a platform rather the focus is now on what kind of right controls and standards are necessary to safeguard data on cloud. Careful understanding and analysis of all related options are sought for moving the applications to the public cloud.
When you are thinking to move to cloud, it is important to plan your application architecture rather than just “lifting and shifting”. And the application architecting process starts with application delivery strategy.
While there are many components in application delivery strategy, one of the first thing that affects the user experience of application is web server infrastructure. It is the web server layer that controls connections to your application, it determines how users perceive performance of the application. In this part of the article, I would take you through how to leverage Nginx – a next generation application delivery platform.
NGINX provides secure, reliable and scalable application delivery platform. It is the most popular and powerful platform being used by world’s busiest web sites. I will take you through just two of the many areas that Nginx is used in cloud architecture.
First, NGINX helps you to build hybrid cloud so that you can leverage on-premises as well as public cloud for delivering the applications. Second, NGINX helps you build cross regional failover so that if something goes down in one region, it auto-failover to another region.
1. Hybrid Cloud Architecture

In this type of deployment both on‑premises and cloud services are leveraged to deliver applications. NGINX Plus provides ‘Least-Time load-balancing algorithm’. Using this algorithm you can create a “cloud bursting” deployment. Eg. when all of your on-premises server are busy traffic is diverted to cloud. Thus your Cloud environment is put to use only on demand. This gives flexibility and scalability leveraging your on-premises infrastructure.
2. Cross Regional load balancing and failover Architecture
 

In this architecture cloud service provider’s native load balancer spreads traffic across the different availability zones. Within each availability zone, NGINX Plus load balances to your application servers. The application behind NGINX Plus can be a monolith, or a microservices‑based application.
These are just couple of examples as to how you can take advantage of Ngnix’s capabilities to design your application delivery platform while moving to cloud architecture.
For enterprise customers, with the availability and maturity of tools and technologies building an on-premises cloud infrastructure is not challenging anymore. What is still challenging is getting the applications, database and data on cloud in an efficient manner. To derive real business value, organizations need to approach application design with considerations of  session state, microservice and mobility. Having application in cloud is not the only thing, but the business process around the applications also have to be optimized to drive real digital transformation. For a successful cloud adoption, you need to evolve both technology and business processes. Moving to cloud is a mindset and not just a set of technologies.
In all our engagements with customers while talking about various technologies such as Postgres, MongoDB, Couchbase, Elastic or Pentaho our approach is ‘Cloud first’ when it comes to architecting the solution. We believe that cloud is not a place of deployment but a way of doing business.
Sandeep Khuperkar I Director and CTO, Ashnik

Sandeep is the Director and CTO at Ashnik. He brings more than 21 years of Industry experience (most of it spans across Red Hat & IBM India), with 14+ years in open source and building open source and Linux business model. He is on Advisory Board of JJM College of Engineering (Electronics Dept.)  And visiting lecturer with few of Engineering colleges and works towards enabling them on open source technologies. He is author, Enthusiast and community moderator at Opensource.com. He is also member of Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation and Open Source Consortium Of India.