第13章ハイブリッドマルチクラウドのデジタルソリューション開発

Among all applications and workloads in the cloud, two common workloads have emerged in recent years. Those are web and mobile workloads where the user wants to provide real-time access to all users across the globe. This is one of the most critical reasons why the user wants to move into the cloud environment because the cost to scale the global infrastructure is extremely high.

A content delivery network (CDN) is an important cloud capability that accelerates web and mobile workloads access globally. A CDN is a network of servers and associated networking infrastructure that is spread across the globe and allows access to web and mobile workloads from anywhere. It is configured to prioritize and cache common data and content (e.g., videos) in different geographical areas so it can increase access and processing speeds of mobile and web applications in the global network, which results in improved user experience and reduced energy costs. On-demand streaming services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Tubi) use CDNs to direct users to the closest server (i.e., a network edge server located at the edge of the network closer to their location) from which they can stream their movies. The web clients/apps provided by these vendors allow dynamic adaptive streaming over the Web (via the HTTP web protocol) to ensure high-quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from CDN servers. Figure 13.5 shows a high-level architecture of how CDN is set up on Azure Cloud Service.

Outside of the infrastructure, the cloud provider is also providing other common patterns and services that most web and mobile applications need to use to provide an optimal experience to the end consumer. These patterns and services are pre-implemented and optimized by the cloud provider and have an easy integration with the compute and storage services where the application runs. The following are two common web and mobile cloud components:

• The component that stores and manages sensitive information securely while allowing the application to be scaled and deployed in different environments on the cloud is secret and configuration management. Different environments will require different configurations and secret details, such as database access or language settings. The best practice to handle complex environmental configurations and secrets is using a global cloud service to inject those details during runtime so the application code can be free of custom implementation and the application deployment and version control would be much simpler. Most cloud providers will allow the user to manage their custom configuration and secrets and update them during application runtime.

• The component that allows developers to centralize all logging data and provide a comprehensive view of all events happening with an application at any moment is logging and monitoring management. As the application grows and scales in different environments, the ability for the developer to know and understand how their application runs becomes more and more important. The administrator’s ability of the administrator to identify and mitigate the issue during the runtime is an essential requirement for any cloud-based application. For this reason, most cloud providers provide logging and monitoring services together with the compute service so that they can centralize all logging data and provide a comprehensive view of all events that are happening with the application at any moment. The user can leverage this service to obtain some monitoring capabilities out of the box when they deploy their application to the cloud environment. However, based on different applications and requirements, the user may expand these capabilities by adding custom logging logic or notification configurations to match their needs. Figure 13.6 shows a simple monitoring dashboard on Azure Cloud Service.