Azure Deployment POCs
for the Cloud Ready Content Analysis System
Solution Sneak Peek
Develop Proof of Concept (POC)
Softwarium studied all of the advantages and disadvantages of VMs and serverless computing and built two POCs to determine which one is the best fit.
Scalable Solution
We broke down the monolithic architecture into micro-services which could be scaled independently.
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
Metalogix was able to save money on computing power and storage while maintaining the same level of service for their customers.
Cloud Ready Product
The on-site sensitive content management platform was revamped to be cloud ready.
About Metalogix
Metalogix is focused on building box products and SaaS helping to reduce the time customers spend managing their IT administration and more on their core business functions. To better serve their customers, they needed to make their product the Sensitive Content Manager cloud-ready and scalable to handle workloads between 1-2 TB an hour.
Metalogix came to Softwarium for assistance in creating proofs of concept (POC) for the product. To do so, we must understand the advantages and disadvantages of both VMs and cloud computing. One of the biggest advantages of VMs has complete control to add any component you wish. However, there are scalability issues that must be overcome when using virtual machines. Since each VM has its own operating system, it adds substantial overhead as far as the RAM and storage footprint is concerned.
Metalogix needed to test two proofs of concept for a product they were running in the cloud. First, it was to structure the product in such a way as to take advantage of the computing power of Azure App Service Virtual machines. The only problem with the Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) is that they might become idle and consume a resource group without actually working.
The second possibility was to use Azure Web Apps Serverless Computing, which takes seconds to start working. This would allow Metalogix to outsource their physical on-premise servers and take advantage of external cloud-based servers run and maintained by Microsoft Azure services and many other platforms. In addition to the speed, serverless leads to significant cost reductions by working as a FaaS (Function as a Service), meaning that it is there for you whenever you need it, and the infrastructure scales the work.
After studying all of the advantages and disadvantages of each hosting option and the technical requirements, Softwarium built two POCs and reduced wasteful operational costs. This was incredibly challenging since Metalogix had a data flow of about 2TB an hour.
Creating the POCs
We started by testing the serverless concept first and immediately encountered a constrained execution environment, resulting in the system’s inability to read certain content such as PDFs. The second issue was that it was not infinitely scalable. Also, the cost of the workloads was very high given the number of executions, thus making it unsustainable from a budget point of view.
Based on these three issues, we decided to use VMs with containers. This allowed us to overcome scaling issues since the operating system is virtualized, allowing multiple workloads to function on a single operating system instance.
Making the Product Cloud Ready
Now that we knew which POC works, we needed to make the product cloud-ready which presented certain difficulties. The workloads were CPU intensive, leading to slower service and the constant need to keep adding virtual machines. There was an additional problem with the database since the secure SQL server was not horizontally scalable.
Let’s take a look at how we used Kubernetes to overcome these issues and created a solution that could handle the necessary traffic and be scaled to accommodate additional users at a moment’s notice.
Dismantling the Monolithic Architecture
We broke down the monolithic architecture into three pieces: file uploading, working with business information and results publishing. Each of these pieces could be deployed as virtual machines, containers or serverless.
The containers leverage a single OS, thus increasing the Azure deployment process speed and portability while lowering the total cost of ownership and provide an environment where microservices can be deployed, managed and scaled independently.
The old database was replaced with a secure Azure Cosmos DB one which is much more scalable depending on the workload. It also allowed Metalogix to save money since they only had to pay for what they used instead of on-premise, which was on all the time.
The New Content Analysis System
Metalogix received the content analysis system that they wanted. The system adhered to all of the criteria that were set out in the very beginning. We reworked the app from an on-premise to a cloud-ready web app, obtained the needed configuration and did 100 GB an hour with 40 virtual machines that could be scaled. This allowed Metalogix to save money on computing power and storage while providing their customers with outstanding service. However, it is essential to note that even though FaaS was not the best approach for this specific solution with these specific workloads, every solution and workload is unique. All “cloud-ready” options should be considered.