Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Server Upgrades and Patches
In an IT environment where services reside in specific hardware servers, maintenance is
inevitableā€”upgrades, preventive maintenance, patches to security holes. It is important to
schedule maintenance during times that would ensure the least disruption to productivity,
such as during the night.
It is important for the maintenance window to be short to ensure that the service can
resume quickly, and there should be a margin of error present in case the maintenance
takes longer than expected.
If possible, maintenance should not be impromptu. What this means is that the technical
team should have tried and tested specific maintenance operations or upgrade procedures
on an exact replica of the actual server or environment. This is to ensure that any problems
that might result will already be known and a solution found.
If you have played massively multiplayer games in the past decade, you will know
that a lot of them have beta or test servers where patches, updates, and improvements
are implemented first, and only after all the bugs are found and fixed will the update
be implemented on the official servers. This also goes for most IT services across many
organizations, but the test team would be selected from hardcore users instead of allow-
ing the whole audience take part in the test.
Managing Cloud Workloads
Cloud computing is essentially the next step of grid and utility computing, where all
resources are accessible through a virtual environment so they can be moved around and
shared infinitely, at least in theory. Gone are the days of manual setup of any IT resource;
we are now in the single-click era of computing. To this end, engineers have created ways
to allow automated resource provisioning and deprovisioning as well as dynamic workload
balancing between different virtual and physical servers to allow for massive scalability
and almost zero downtime.
Not all workloads are suited for cloud computing, but most web applications are. And
because of the prevalence of the Internet globally and the rapid advancement of mobile
technology, web applications are now transitioning to cloud applications or scalable web
apps. And it is this type of applications that will fully utilize the dynamic workload man-
agement for which cloud environments are built.
Managing Workloads Right on the Cloud
Web applications have the tendency to spike in traffic unpredictably, leading to exponential
scale in the required resources, which in turn requires provisioning of multiple new virtual
Search WWH ::




Custom Search