AN INTRODUCTION TO MULTI-GENERATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) is a new, application-first approach to data strategies that helps protect and optimize workload deployments today and provides flexibility for future infrastructure needs.
What Is Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI)?
Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) is a new, application-first approach to data strategies that helps protect and optimize workload deployments today and provides flexibility for future infrastructure needs.
Why Did We Architect the MGI Strategy?
Applications move faster than contracts, so your organization should have the ability to shift your workload as needed.
With the flexibility of MGI, you can change your infrastructure strategy as your needs change. In fact, 68% of CIOs worry about lock-in with their infrastructure. At the same time, organizations waste 35% of cloud spend every year.
100% cloud and 100% colocation may not be the best options — your organization may benefit the most from a hybrid solution that provides you with the ability to change and scale alongside the application’s needs.
Application-First vs Infrastructure First
Historically, the infrastructure-first approach forced workloads into the infrastructure, which can cost unnecessary money, cause issues with the application, and other concerns.
With an application-first approach, each workload gets exactly the infrastructure it needs, when it needs it — which means infrastructure can scale quickly and evolve over time.
Why Make the Change to an Application-First Approach?
This change solves for the core challenge that’s being faced: no two workloads are equally created. Different applications have different performance requirements, which means not everything will work best with the same infrastructure.
In addition, applications are living systems with needs that evolve over time. What an application needs today is not necessarily what it will need a year from now. It may be crucial for an application to move and be served from the cloud or colocation, to improve cost, latency, user experience for example.
MGI in Practice
An Expanding Tourism Application faced a historical weakness in the cloud. They needed to process data using network appliances to analyze packets at wire speed. By utilizing an application-first approach, (aka MGI), this organization had the ability to re-architect their cloud and hybrid environments to perform within the parent company’s hybrid environment to maximize the strengths of AWS and their data centers.
Through Evoque’s SpendAgility Mix, they have 35% of their infrastructure in colocation, 30% in hybrid, and 35% in the cloud — all with the ability to change these if needed and shift costs from colocation to cloud engineering or cloud connectivity throughout the duration of the contract.
The Kubernetes Revolution
Kubernetes (K8s) is a container orchestration system that supports choosing the right deployment infrastructure for your application needs.
Abstracting the infrastructure from the application can be a huge advantage in both the cloud and the data center in a number of ways, including:
- By monitoring your applications, K8s can create an effective, healthy environment for your workload that’s continuously updated.
- They also provide horizontal scaling of the deployed application, where it can be scaled as needed from command-line to user-interface.
But the Kubernetes benefits don’t end there. Even though hybrid deployments are not necessarily a primary focus of K8s, the benefits are already visible. Through this tool, organizations can improve their workload, create a healthy data environment, and effectively manage their data.
Workload Deployment Evolution and Maturity
Applications are living entities that will grow and change over time — that’s why MGI allows you to evolve your infrastructure along with the needs of the application.
Here is an example of how a customer-facing SaaS might scale with MGI over the course of a decade:
- Initial Development. In this beginning phase, the application is deployed solely on the cloud and primarily focused on improving the user experience and performance. This is also when the baselines for cost effectiveness, scalability, and business continuity in the cloud are established.
- Scaleup Period. This occurs in years two through four, when the workload deployment is updated to include colocation and the cloud, as that’s the best infrastructure for the application at that time. This allows the application to maintain the improved user experience and performance, as well as improve scalability, cost efficiency, and business continuity.
- Full Maturity. From years five to ten, the application may require a blended infrastructure of colocation, the cloud, and edge computing. This allows it to maintain optimum user experience and improved scalability while improving cost efficiency even more than during the scaleup period while fortifying business continuity.
As applications mature and evolve, organizations should have the ability to move them as they will be most efficient.
While every organization can benefit from certain applications utilizing the cloud, every application may not run most effectively there. A cloud-only solution may not be the right solution for your organization.
Some applications, for example, require more performance than the cloud can deliver, which is why your organization should have options for workload deployment.
Blended Infrastructure Options
There are a number of leaders in this space that provide hybrid and multi-cloud options to create the most effective environment for your business. Some of the main organizations in this space include:
Each of these provides solutions to extend their already-existing cloud infrastructure services.
The Cloud Is for Every Organization, but Not Every Application Deployment
Cloud OnRamps, Direct Connects, Cross Connects, and Your MGI Strategy
Interconnectivity is the core of an effective MGI strategy, as it allows your organization to have a powerful combination of agile capabilities.
Through cloud connectivity, you can have multi-directional elasticity that gives you the freedom and power to shift your workloads from one platform to the next, as workloads demand.
In addition, you can secure your connectivity through point-to-point connections over dedicated ports that utilize a private network to segregate traffic from the internet.
The Role of the Data Center in Multi-Generational Infrastructure
Data centers serve a crucial role in the hybrid infrastructure. While the cloud is flexible, not every workload runs most efficiently there, which is where data centers come into play.
Colocation is a great fit for even most demanding workloads, as it provides a high-performance environment for the applications within your blended infrastructure. This is a great way to maximize performance and minimize latency for your organization in an application-first environment.
Benefits of MGI vs. the Status Quo in Cloud
The hybrid cloud inherently comes with a number of benefits for organizations, including:
- Disaster recovery and business continuity.
- Reduced cost.
- Reliability.
- Remote workforce improvements.
- Scalability.
In addition to the benefits of the hybrid cloud, there are some that are specific to MGI.
SpendAgility™
SpendAgility™ is a flexible contract feature that allows users to customize and scale workloads while maintaining a fixed monthly cost. For example, if you need to shift your workloads from the data center into the cloud, you can relinquish the data center space and shift that spend to CloudOps and/or cloud connectivity.
The Freedom to Change
This freedom to change allows you to update your workload as needed. Instead of waiting until the end of a contract to optimize your workload, your DevOps team would be able to make those changes when they are needed for the application to run most efficiently.
Benefits Across the Board
There are benefits of the cloud for everyone in your organization:
The Journey to Success With MGI
While transforming your environment from infrastructure-first to application-first, there are a number of common stages we’ve identified.
Here are the five steps to MGI success:
- Status Quo. This is where we were — force-fitting workloads into infrastructures that simply didn’t work well for them. This costs unnecessary time and money while preventing organizations from remediating problems and planning for the future.
- Best-Fit. This is the first step toward an application-first approach, which deployed workload-specific decisions, silos of visibility, and predictable costs — all to help organizations make better decisions with their approach.
- Optimization. This stage is exactly what you’d expect — it’s all about enhancing your organization’s hybrid cloud experience. For example, we can begin application lifecycle management, which allows for an oversight of the application and a better understanding of where in the hybrid cloud it can be delivered most effectively. We can also begin to make data-driven decisions that help reduce cost and improve performance.
- Innovation Acceleration. With ecosystem-wide workload management and the ability to continuously improve your organization’s hybrid cloud usage. In addition, with full infrastructure observability at this stage, your organization will have the ability to make decisions that continue to improve the business through decisions that are data-driven.
- Transformation. Finally, we reach a stage of holistic automated operations, application-driven revenue that continues accelerating, and predictive decisions that are made based on workload deployment recommendations.
Throughout this entire process, your organization is continuously recalibrating and growing through the cloud, colocation, and hybrid cloud to gain and improve your competitive advantage over the competition. In addition, with the right partner, you can have continuous problem remediation and transformation engineering to help your organization along this journey.
Choosing the Right Partner for your MGI Strategy
When choosing the right partner for your MGI strategy implementation, there are some key characteristics you should look for, including:
- Unmatched Operational Excellence. With seamless orchestration of platform deployment for on-premise, colocation, the cloud, multi-cloud systems, and edge computing, you can have the widest range of options to meet your organization’s needs.
- Rock-Solid Reliability. You need to be able to count on the infrastructure — market-leading uptime across complete multi-generational infrastructure ecosystem is crucial.
- Game-Changing Cost Optimization. To avoid cost bloat or any unnecessary costs, resource right-sizing with dynamic scaling capabilities and full visibility into provisioning and allocation is a must-have capability.
- Freedom To Change. You’ll want a partner with the ability to provide non-restrictive contracts that allow you to modify your infrastructure mix based on your needs.
- Client-Advantage Philosophy. There are no one-size-fits-all answers. Instead, you need unwavering commitment to the right multi-generational infrastructure strategy decisions for your business over time enhances application delivery and IT team peace-of-mind.
- Security You Can Count On. It’s crucial that your data stays safe, so your MGI strategy implementation partner needs to have best practices across all physical, virtual, and network assets — with performance and agility benefits by design.
- Superior Performance Efficiency. Well-architected multi-generational infrastructure solutions are crafted to balance speed and cost while never compromising on security to deliver outstanding user experiences the maximize efficiency.
- Growth-By-Design Packaging. The right partner for your organization should have a creative approach to establishing the right forward-thinking agreement that’s inclusive of transport, colo, custom design, ramping, and cloud across terms, pricing, billing, support, and more.
- Expertise on Demand. With a nimble approach to introducing new capabilities and services based on the holistic view of your multi-generational infrastructure and grounded in ongoing recalibration, you can optimize your workload today, tomorrow and for generations to come.
Once you’ve identified the key characteristics of your ideal MGI partner, you’re ready to begin the journey to an application-first approach that can revolutionize the way you, your team, and your clients succeed and grow.
NEXT STEP: TALK TO AN EVOQUE INFRASTRUCTURE EXPERT
Building secure data centers, alongside fault tolerant, self healing, cloud enabled, and automated workloads is our specialty. We’re uptime obsessed and committed to delivering the best colocation and cloud solution for our customers from one generation of their application to the next.