Cognizant 20-20 Insights
April 2020
Digital Systems & Technology
10 Key Digital Infrastructure
Considerations
As digital becomes ever-more essential to revenue growth and market
relevance, its underlying infrastructure must be made as ecient as possible
if digital is to realize its true potential. By prioritizing foundational technology
modernization and simplification, organizations can accelerate their
transformation into the digital era.
Executive Summary
For businesses gearing up to embrace digital
transformation, applying traditional infrastructure designs
or patterns can prove detrimental. Any well-architected
application architecture needs to carefully consider
advancements in the infrastructure space and leverage
them to be truly eective.
While there are numerous issues to work through, what
follows are 10 key infrastructure considerations for digital
transformation projects. Please note that while this
white paper focuses on Amazon Web Services (AWS),
organizations can apply similar services provided by cloud
service providers such as Microsoft or Google based on
the cloud platform of their choice.
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1 Continuous improvement is key
As the delivery of new iterations of applications
becomes increasingly crucial, applying the DevOps
construct of continuous delivery (CD) needs to be at
the heart of the application design. CD determines
the speed at which organizations can respond to
threats, risks and opportunities.
For more, read our white paper, “Continuous
Integration and Continuous Delivery to Facilitate
Web Service Testing.”
AWS services such as CodeBuild, CodePipeline,
Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation can play
a pivotal role in ensuring faster, more consistent
delivery of the application.
2 Consider being serverless
Wherever possible, consider using serverless
architectures in application design. Leveraging
content delivery network services such as Amazon
CloudFront helps in delivering content (static and
dynamic) to end users worldwide with minimal latency.
Utilizing a combination of AWS services such as
Simple Storage Service (S3), API Gateway, Lambda
and DynamoDB/Aurora to host completely serverless
web applications on the cloud can reduce costs
and eorts while providing excellent availability and
durability. Compared to the traditional approach,
using services such as S3, CloudFront and Lambda
can reduce the eort (and thereby costs) needed to
build and manage multiple app/web servers.
3 Advocate loose coupling
Adopt loose coupling in the application architecture
to ensure that dependencies between the application
tiers/components are minimal. Achieving loose
coupling will enable dierent tiers/components to
scale independently based on the demand. Simple
queue services (SQS) makes it easy and cost-eective
to decouple application components.
When loosely coupled applications (such as web tiers,
Hadoop, Stateless applications, etc.) leverage Spot
instances, it improves the application’s robustness
while also reducing costs significantly. As a best
practice, one can have a script that will run every
minute or so to check for the two-minute-warning
received for Spot instances and remove the instance
from elastic load balancers (ELB) accordingly. Using
batching with SQS will significantly reduce costs while
improving throughput.
Thinking about failure while architecting the application will result in
the consideration and inclusion of resilience and recovery strategies
in the design, bringing about a much more stable application.
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4 Think about failure
Thinking about failure while architecting the
application will result in the consideration and inclusion
of resilience and recovery strategies in the design,
bringing about a much more stable application. For
example, consider using multiple availability zones or
even multiple regions if required.
Using Elastic IPs will allow the application to failover
gracefully. Compared to traditional databases, fully
managed databases such as DynamoDB and Aurora
can enhance availability, durability, throughput and
cost savings.
5 Prepare to let go
Consider the various platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
and software-as-a-service (SaaS) oerings from the
application/cloud hosting vendors.
This can lead to performance optimization or make
it the least of your concerns. Using services such
as DynamoDB and ElastiCache in the application
design eliminates the need for dedicated server
setup and configuration.
Also, using services such as Amazon Relational
Database Service (for horizontally scaling the
database tier) and Elastic Load Balancing will go
a long way toward achieving the desired level
of scalability while satisfying other operational
requirements.
6 Monitoring drives performance & availability
Continuous monitoring of applications can have a
profound impact on the performance and availability
of applications. AWS Config enables IT organizations
to assess, audit and evaluate the configurations of
the resources. If any of the Config rules are triggered,
AWS Config invokes the rule’s Lambda function
defined to simplify compliance auditing, security
analysis, change management and operational
troubleshooting.
Integrating monitoring (CloudWatch) with services
such as SQS, simple notification services (SNS) and
Lambda helps identify and remediate issues at a
very early stage, preventing failures, breaches or
downtime.
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Consider granting access by roles instead of individual
users. Along with securing data at rest, architect the
application to secure data in transit, thereby
moving toward end-to-end security.
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Consider using tools such as cost calculators, detailed billing reports
and trusted advisor recommendations to understand cost savings
and stay on top of spending.
As application logs can often hold sensitive information, it is crucial
that they be stored in a secure location with access restricted to
auditing/incident response teams. Consider storing logs in an S3
bucket with access allowed through IAM roles for auditing accounts.
7 Security is sacrosanct
Block access by default and implement defense in
depth. Consider granting access by roles instead of
individual users. Along with securing data at rest,
architect the application to secure data in transit,
thereby moving toward end-to-end security.
Avoid using access keys and never create access
keys for the root account. If the organization uses
access keys — public key and private key — consider
designing the application such that these values
can be passed as parameters while accessing the
application through an application programming
interface rather than storing the private key as a
part of the application’s source code repository.
Incorporating multifactor authentication can provide
an additional layer of security. Define a process to
change access keys on a regular basis and delete
unused ones.
8 Logging to improve compliance
Logging can provide organizations with actionable
intelligence when responding to requests or even
attacks. At times, logging can come in handy when
responding to regulators. Although logging is
predominantly used for troubleshooting errors or
performance issues, logs have evolved to become
the primary source of information about events
related to application security.
As application logs can often hold sensitive
information, it is crucial that they be stored in a
secure location with access restricted to auditing/
incident response teams. Consider storing logs in
an S3 bucket with access allowed through identity
and access management (IAM) roles for auditing
accounts.
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9 Prioritize cost optimization
Identify and eliminate costs where possible. Cloud
platforms are best suited for exploratory approaches
because organizations only pay for what is used.
Hosting the development/test/proof of concept
environments on a pay-as-you-go model lowers
costs. Features such as autoscaling can help scale
optimally based on performance and increase the
number of users per application.
For workloads (such as web servers and test
servers), which do not often need to use the full CPU
consistently, use burstable performance instances
(T2) because they could deliver significant savings
while providing the capability to burst occasionally
with any simultaneous spikes in usage. Consider
using tools such as cost calculators, detailed billing
reports and trusted advisor recommendations to
understand cost savings and stay on top of spending.
10 Load balance wisely
Achieve segmentation while reducing the number
of ELBs by using application load balancers (ALBs).
NGINX or NGINX Plus can come to the rescue if
caching or multiple load balancing methods are
required (as ELB/ALB only supports AWS’s Round-
Robin). A combination of ELB and NGINX can also
be used where ELB is primarily internet-facing
and handles secure socket layer termination while
multiple NGINX nodes handle caching and routing
requests to the application servers.
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Looking forward
Having an IT infrastructure that supports the
business’s digital transformation journey will require
adequate foresight, planning, investment and
innovation. Cloud oerings have been disruptive
in transforming IT from being a cost center to a
business enabler. Addressing the aforementioned
considerations will help organizations avoid many
typical pitfalls or anti-patterns that have undermined
previous digital journeys.
While infrastructure-as-a-service cloud oerings
for compute, storage and database operations can
seem like a good fit in traditional tiered/layered
application architectures, utilizing various PaaS and
SaaS cloud oerings can help organizations deploy
applications based on event-driven or microkernel-
or microservices-based architectures cost-eectively —
and with additional benefits such as agility,
scalability and robustness. As always, evaluate before
committing completely.
About the author
Sudharson Aravamudhan
Senior Infrastructure Architect, Cognizant Infrastructure Services
Sudharson Aravamudhan is a Senior Infrastructure Architect with Cognizant Infrastructure Services. He has
over 14 years of experience in the IT industry and has consulting experience at several leading companies
across numerous industries, focusing predominantly on infrastructure consulting, data center migration,
cloud and architecture. He holds a master’s degree in human resource management from Pondicherry
University and a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication from Madurai Kamaraj University.
Sudharson can be reached at Sudharson.[email protected]om.
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About Cognizant
Cognizant (Nasdaq-100: CTSH) is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology
models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and ecient businesses.
Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant is ranked 193 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn
how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com or follow us @Cognizant.
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