IT skill development and certifications are advantageous to both businesses and employees

 

According to survey of nearly 8,000 IT decision makers and professionals worldwide, 72% of

organizations now view formal training as an important strategy to close the skills gap, an increase

of approximately 12% from compared to the previous year.

Additionally, 96% of companies say certified employees are valuable, with 85% approving the training in the previous year. To address current IT skills gaps and prepare for future technological advancements, organizations must continue to place greater emphasis on training the IT workforce. 

This focus will improve the organization's ability to hire qualified candidates, retain current employees and increase productivity.

 It is well known that the IT skills gap has a significant impact on organizations. 

Business Benefits:

Increased Productivity: With computer skills, employees can work more efficiently, thereby increasing business productivity. 

Competitive Advantage: Computer skills can give a business a competitive edge by enabling it to adopt new technologies and processes faster than competitors.

Improved customer satisfaction: IT skills can help businesses improve customer service and support, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. 

Cost Reduction: IT skills can help businesses reduce IT costs by optimizing IT infrastructure and improving IT processes. 

Better risk management: IT skills can help companies identify and mitigate IT-related risks, such as data breaches, system failures, and cyberattacks. 

Employee Benefits

Career Development: IT skills and certifications can help employees advance their careers, making them more marketable and more valuable to employers. 

Better Job Opportunities: Computer skills can open up new job opportunities for employees and increase their earning potential. 

Increased Job Satisfaction: Computer skills can help employees perform their job responsibilities more effectively, thereby increasing job satisfaction. 

Personal Growth: Computer skills can help employees develop new skills and knowledge that benefit them professionally and personally. 

Job Security: Computer skills can make employees more valuable to employers and increase their job security, as businesses will always need IT professionals. 

AWS certifications in particular are in high demand with 5 in the top 15 highest paying IT certifications in North America, 3 in the top 10 in Latin America, 4 in the top 10 in APAC and 2 more in the Top 10 in Europe, Middle East and Africa. 

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is one of the most popular cloud computing platforms in the world. 

AWS offers a range of certifications for IT professionals who want to confirm their cloud computing knowledge and skills. 

Here are some of the benefits of AWS Certification for employees: 

Career Advancement: AWS Certification can help IT professionals advance their careers by demonstrating cloud computing expertise and knowledge. 

Employers often seek AWS Certified candidates, which increases job opportunities and salary potential.

Industry Recognition: The AWS Certification is widely recognized in the IT industry and highly respected by employers. Having an AWS certification can help professionals differentiate themselves from the competition and increase their credibility. 

Improve Professional Performance: AWS Certifications provide IT professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to effectively use AWS services and technologies. This can improve work performance and productivity.

Learn New Skills: AWS certifications require individuals to learn new skills and understand the latest cloud computing trends and technologies. It can be rewarding for individuals and can help professionals expand their knowledge and expertise in their fields. 

Access to AWS Resources: AWS Certifications provide access to a range of resources, including online training, practice exams, and the AWS Community. These resources are valuable for continuous learning and professional development. 

Increased job security: As cloud computing continues to grow, the demand for IT professionals with AWS certifications is likely to increase. Having an AWS certification can provide professionals with job security and career stability. 

In summary, AWS certifications provide IT professionals with a range of benefits, including career growth, industry recognition, improved job performance, learning new skills, access to AWS resources and increased job security. 

Conclusion:  Developing and certifying IT skills is good for businesses and good for employees. They can help companies increase productivity, gain a competitive advantage and reduce costs, while providing employees with opportunities for career growth, better job opportunities and personal development.

Written by, Prakhar Dubey, Sales Executive (Cloud.in)

Kubernetes is the key to cloud, but cost containment is critical

What’s driving the growth of open source container orchestrator Kubernetes? A study by Pepperdata shows how companies are using K8s and the challenges they face in getting a handle on cloud costs.

With the rush to cloud enterprise comes increasing use of Kubernetes to get applications up and running on the web. A recent study by big data monitoring firm Pepperdata looked at both the growth of Kubernetes use and how companies are addressing it from cost and revenue fronts.

Pepperdata’s The state of Kubernetes 2023 report found that, on average, organizations deploy between three and 10 Kubernetes clusters. It also revealed that the use of the open-source container orchestration system is expanding to data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics, databases, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Pepperdata, in its survey of 800 C-level execs and DevOps professionals working in financial services, healthcare, technology and advertising, asked:

• How many K8s clusters organizations run.
• Which workload types do they deploy on K8s containers.
• Challenges encountered by enterprises as they adopt Kubernetes.
• How enterprises measure the ROI of their K8s deployments.
• Where companies stand in their FinOps journey.

Kubernetes: Deployment beyond microservices is driving broader use

As Kubernetes reaches maturity and becomes an industry standard for container orchestration, its uses are also broadening beyond its core application as a mothership for microservices. The study found that:

• 30% of executives reported having three to five K8s deployments.
• 38% reported six to 10 clusters.
• Almost 15% said they had between 11 and 25 clusters.
• 4% reported having deployed more than 25 clusters.

In terms of how enterprises are deploying Kubernetes for specific workloads, Pepperdata found:

• 61% of surveyed companies are using Kubernetes to deploy data ingestion, cleansing, and analytics through software like Apache Spark.
• 59% are using Kubernetes for deploying databases or data cache via platforms like PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis.
• 58% reported using Kubernetes on web servers like NGINX.
• 54% said they are deploying AI/ML software, such as Python, TensorFlow and PyTorch on Kubernetes.
• 48% said they are using Kubernetes for programming languages like Node.js and Java.
• 42% reported using Kubernetes for logging and monitoring through programs like Elastic and Splunk.
• 35% said they are deploying application servers with Kubernetes.

Microservices are still a good proxy for Kubernetes deployment

Pepperdata’s study suggests that organizations will be adopting Kubernetes in greater numbers, given their plans to deploy microservices like NGINX. Forty-four percent of respondents said they plan to do so this year, while 36% said they have microservices deployed already and only 20% saying they had no plans to do so.

Also, the majority of those polled said Kubernetes provides them a strong foundational architecture for microservices, and that it enables applications to be deployed more rapidly and supports platform consistency across development, testing, staging and production clusters.

Looking at Kubernetes with an eye on ROI

Pepperdata discovered that among those polled, cost to deploy was the leading metric for measuring Kubernetes’ ROI, with findings suggesting that almost 44% of the organizations are looking at ways to implement cloud cost reduction.

After cost, top-line growth (54%), resource usage (49%), followed by deployment frequency (48%), developer productivity (46%), infrastructure utilization (35%) and IT staff productivity savings (25%) were key ROI metrics. Firms reported they expect Kubernetes to increase ROI by lowering administration and operations burden, accelerating deployment times and making resource management more efficient.

Cost surprises are a key challenge for K8s

When Pepperdata surveyed IT leaders about the challenges they faced in adopting Kubernetes:

• 57% said significant or unexpected spending on computation, storage networking infrastructures and cloud-based IaaS.
• 56% cited the learning curve for employees to be able to upskill for operations and security in Kubernetes environments.
• 52% pointed to limited support for stateful apps (such as applications that save client data).
• 50% said lack of visibility into Kubernetes’ spending.

Organizations are walking toward cloud cost reduction

In its FinOps performance study, the FinOps Foundation among other things defines the levels of familiarity with FinOps from crawl to walk to run. In Pepperdata’s study, most respondents self-identified at the walk stage.

The study said that nearly all respondents were familiar with cloud cost optimization, while 32% characterized themselves as “crawling.” The majority (43%) said they are “walking,” meaning they have the ability to implement cloud cost reduction recommendations today. Seventeen percent self-reported as “running,” meaning they are actively reducing costs through autonomous procedures. Six percent said they have not started.

Interestingly, more than 98% of respondents indicated familiarity with FinOps and saw themselves somewhere on the continuum of implementing best practices for cloud cost remediation. In addition, more than 17% of respondents identified themselves in the run stage, with the ability to remediate cloud costs autonomously.

Courtesy: https://www.techrepublic.com/

ADOPTION OF A MULTI-CLOUD STRATEGY HELPS DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS

We have witnessed over the last couple of years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic that migrating to the cloud has accelerated to cater to the social and business dynamics.  Those enterprises hesitating to go ahead with cloud adoption will soon face extinction.  According to Gartner, Inc., Enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing within addressable market segments, will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025.  Gartner’s ‘cloud shift’ research includes only those enterprise IT categories that can transition to the cloud, within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure markets.

Today a significant number of companies are preferring a mix of legacy platforms, on-premise private cloud, and multiple public cloud services in their effort to establish a robust IT infrastructure, services, and operations in the new business models.

Demand for multi-cloud architecture for its numerous benefits

The multi-cloud architecture involves leveraging multiple cloud services from different cloud service providers to cater to various requirements.  The architecture can increase availability and enhance performance by enabling organizations to stretch their workloads across different cloud service providers. Depending on their requirement, they can switch between providers. It helps IT teams navigate the complexities of different IT environments and is increasingly used by businesses.  According to Grand View Research, the global multi-cloud management market size which was valued at USD 6.37 billion in 2021, is expected to expand at a CAGR of 27.5% from 2022 to 2030.  The need for more efficiency, reliable services, flexibility, automation, effective governance, and cost-effectiveness with various platforms and the elimination of vendor lock-in instances are driving the high growth of the multi-cloud market.

A robust multiple-cloud strategy will provide all the business benefits when implemented and managed well.  Organizations can mix and match storage, analytics, apps, networking, and other resources that are best suitable for their workloads, without depending on any single provider.  Disaster recovery capabilities can also be improved with the distribution of workloads across platforms.  Furthermore, by paying only for what they use, businesses can scale as required thereby optimizing cloud costs.

Implementing the most appropriate multi-cloud strategy is key

CIOs and IT teams have the challenge of navigating the complexity of different cloud environments effectively to optimize performance.  However, a step-by-step guide will help teams to overcome the constraints and deliver business value.

Teams should at the outset determine the reason for deploying multi-cloud, technical requirements, resources needed, approximate budget, and assignment deadlines. The goals should be defined which could be the expansion to new markets, cost optimization, speedy delivery of apps, and improvising self-service models or automation, among others.

Determine which apps and workloads require which cloud services, ensure high availability and identify the data and processes that require to be safeguarded.  Ensure tight integration between clouds, high levels of interoperability, and migration of data between environments.  It is equally important to establish how critical the workloads are for the existing business.

Thoroughly research various vendors keeping the workload in mind, besides cost, data storage, and security services offered, and choose those suitable to the requirement and budget.  The IT team should be well-versed in optimization techniques, and automation policies and be able to analyze complex cloud discount options.  Roles and responsibilities have to be clearly defined based on the team’s skill set.  The team members have to be proficient in multi-cloud orchestration, cloud monitoring, and Infrastructure as Code.

Greater visibility of the cloud architecture and usage has to be established with the right tools for managing multiple cloud resources.  Choosing a single pane of glass to manage multi-cloud accounts with a suitable Cloud Management Platform is crucial to visual real-time cloud data.  Define a spending budget and ensure the team remains within the allocated resources.  Post implementation, reviewing the multi-cloud strategy has to be put in place, and finally refining the overall strategy to suit evolving requirements is very vital.

Following best practices ensure strategy success

Identify and select the most appropriate tool which has features and integrations that support multi-cloud infrastructure management.  This can help achieve efficiencies to a great extent.  It is essential to standardize as much as possible as it is not advisable to establish the multi-cloud architecture based on a specific capability of one of the cloud providers.  Standard protocols and formats for storage, computing, virtual machines, containerization, and networking have to be used.  They should facilitate the multi-cloud architecture and the solution should work with multiple cloud providers.  A third-party monitoring strategy is required to oversee the entire multi-cloud infrastructure.

With clarity in modularization, modules and configurations can be shifted from cloud to cloud without any kind of rework.  This speeds up and streamlines the processes, while significantly reducing the workload on the team.

Containers have to be leveraged for migrating workloads between different cloud environments as they provide better portability of sub-components and app management becomes far simpler.  Implementing a comprehensive, unified security protocol is much required as it provides complete control of the application.

The multi-cloud era is certainly becoming the new normal for organizations across industry verticals as it improves performance and drives future growth. Understanding the different cloud environments, taking the right decision, and implementing the right multi-cloud strategy is imperative to business success.

By Rahul S Kurkure, Founder and Director of Cloud.in. 

Quality Management, Customer Retention & Satisfaction

Quality management:

Quality Management is an important aspect of any business. It helps organizations to ensure that their products and services meet the highest standards of quality at all times inclusive of all business aspects. This can be fulfilled using the various widely used quality control and assurance techniques, such as statistical process control, total quality management, Six Sigma, and many more. Quality management also involves ongoing improvement and the use of customers’ feedback to make necessary, suggested and required changes to the products or services to improve customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Quality management majorly includes four components, which are listed below;

• Quality Planning: In this part we identify the quality standards relevant to the project and decide the path to fulfill them.

• Quality Improvement: In this part we make changes to a process for improving the reliability of the end result.

• Quality Control: In this part continuous efforts by the team members are made to uphold a process’s integrity and reliability for achieving the end result

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• Quality Assurance: In this part systematic or planned actions which are necessary to offer sufficient reliability are taken to make sure that a particular service meets the specified requirements.

The main focus of controlling and managing the quality aspect of a business is to ensure that the organization’s stakeholders are working together in improving the company’s processes, products, services, and the overall culture to achieve long-term success that stems for both business growth and  customer satisfaction.

The process of quality control & management involves a collection of guidelines that are developed internally by the team to make sure that the services that they provide are of right standards, correct purpose and right usage for the end user i.e. “the customer”.

Below mentioned is the basic framework used by service providers for ensuring that the quality is maintained throughout the process and the end result is as per the standards committed;

• The process starts when the organization sets quality targets that are to be met. These targets are also agreed upon with the customer while the customer is on-boarded or when the contract is finalized.

• The organization, after defining the targets, designs the way as to how the targets will be achieved and measured. It takes into consideration the collective actions that are required to be taken and measures quality.

• The organization after this identifies quality issues, if any, that arise or may arise and find ways for improvement methods.

• The final step involves the accounting of the overall level of the quality achieved.

The above mentioned process ensures that the products and services produced and/or provided by the team match the customers’ expectations and provide the expected end results.

Service Level Agreement metrics:

Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics are specific measurements used to track and evaluate the performance of a service provider in meeting the terms of an SLA. These metrics are used to determine whether the service provider is meeting their obligations towards the customer in a timely manner in resolving the various requests, tasks and tickets. 

Monitoring the SLA metrics can be used as a measure to identify the areas where the service provider excels and also the areas where the service provider needs to improve and then take steps in that area to address the issues that may be impacting the quality of the service they provide.

We, as a company, use SLA metrics for measuring and meeting our service contract items. These metrics are criteria negotiated between us and our customers that lay down a road-map stating the quantitative targets that have to be achieved for the service we provide. We take readings to monitor and ensure that the services being provided matches what is defined in the service contract made with the customers.

Average Handling Time:

Average handling time (AHT), also referred to as Average resolution time is the metric used to measure the amount of time that is spent on resolving a particular request, starting from the time it is received till the time it is resolved. This includes the time spent on understanding the issue and research, time spent with the customer probing, time spent working towards the resolution and any other such time spent working on completing the customer's request. 

AHT is used as a measure to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of a process or service driven business towards customers’ interaction, satisfaction and resolution. AHT is measured in minutes. A low AHT indicates that the service representative is able to understand and assist the customer's requests and resolve the issues quickly and efficiently. A high AHT, on the other hand, indicates that the service representative is spending too much time on each resolution, which can lead to longer wait times for customers, resulting in reduced efficiency and effectiveness. 

Businesses such as ours use AHT to identify areas where we need to improve our customer service processes and train our team members to handle interactions and requests more effectively & efficiently and in a timely manner. We, as a team, also use AHT to monitor and evaluate the performance of individual team members.

First Contact Resolution:

First Contact Resolution rate or FCR rate is a metric that measures the number/percentage of customer cases that are resolved by a service provider in the first contact itself (be it on-call or via email). FCR is an important indicator of the service provider’s team’s success rate. 

For service providers, there are a number of indicators that measure resolution efficiency such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), agent productivity, etc. Out of those metrics, FCR stands out since it directly indicates the quality of customer experience an organization delivers via the medium of support that they provide. 

A high FCR rate means the support team as a whole is able to resolve a large number of cases in the first contact itself without the need of multiple emails/calls to & from customers. For

customers, resolution in first interaction is a very important concern when they do business with any service provider via support agent.

A high FCR rate helps the business with below mentioned points:

Team motivation: The ability of a team to address customer requests efficiently leads to improved productivity as well as a rise in morale, resulting in a flourishing business.

Customer retention: If a customer is satisfied with the service provided by the organization, they are more likely to do business with it again in the future.

Cost Benefits: In lieu of time spent by team members and affecting productivity, FCR eliminates the need for repeated callbacks and email chains.

Competitive advantage: The more satisfied a customer is, the less likely they are to go to another business partner or competitor and vent about your business. Instead, they will remain loyal to one organization until they have been successfully assisted.

Customer Satisfaction & Retention:

Customer satisfaction and retention is an important aspect of any successful business. Keeping customers happy and engaged is essential for long-term success.

Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction refers to the measure of how well a business' products and/or services meet or exceed the expectations of its customers and its end users. A business that consistently meets or exceeds customers’ expectations typically has a high level of customer satisfaction. High levels of customer satisfaction are important for a business as a whole because satisfied customers are more likely to return and make repeat purchases, and they also recommend the business to others which results in organic marketing without any additional costs.

Businesses can measure customer satisfaction through various methods, such as surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback forms. They can then use this information to identify the areas where they need to improve their products or services and meet customer needs and expectations in a better way.

To increase customer satisfaction, businesses focus on delivering high-quality products and/or services, providing excellent customer service, being responsive to customer needs and complaints, and continuously seeking ways to improve the customer experience.

Taking care of customers pays off. Companies that establish tight connections with clients or customers tend to experience better financial results as well. According to a study conducted, around ⅔ of buyers/consumers say that a positive customer experience largely determines their loyalty to the brand. Moreover, 32% of customers will completely stop interaction with their beloved brand if a negative experience happens. It seems that a good customer management system is a very important and an essential competitive advantage for companies that want to prosper in the market.

Customer retention: Customer retention refers to the ability of a business to keep its existing customers over long periods of time. A business with a high rate of customer retention is able to retain a large percentage of its customer base, which can provide significant benefits in terms of revenue as well as results in a profitable business over the time of its existence.

There are several strategies that service producers or providers use to improve customer retention, such as Delivering high-quality products/services, providing excellent customer service, building strong relationships with customers, continuously seeking customer feedback, personalization, on time resolution, etc.

Overall, customer retention is a key metric for any business to track its journey, as it provides a clear indication of how well the company is doing in terms of meeting customer needs and expectations.

By, Garvit Arora, Quality Assurance Analyst (Cloud.in)

Capture client IP address on the Web server logs which is behind Load Balancer

By default, the Apache Web server Captures the Load balancer IP in access logs

In this Blog, We are going to Learn about Capturing Client IP addresses in Apache web server logs . 

What is an Application Load balancer?

The application load balancer in AWS helps to distribute the traffic across multiple instances which are attached to the Target groups. When we create the Load balancer, By default DNS endpoint is getting  created. Endpoints are like HTTP URLs which we can browse on any browser ex: Chrome, Firefox

AWS is responsible for the infrastructure availability of the load balancer. Load Balancer DNS endpoints have dynamic IP addresses which will be taken care of by the AWS. However, we can store the ALB Access logs in the s3 by enabling Access logs in the attribute section of the load balancer. Hence s3 grants access to the load balancer to store the access logs. 

Disadvantages of storing ALB logs in s3

• Access logs will store in the form of zip files in the s3 bucket. That is in the compressed format 

• Compressed format files cant be read directly from the s3 console.

• We should download the zip file and then need to extract the file. An extracted log file will be in the unstructured format. 

• Difficult to read the unstructured format for a human. Hence AWS recommends us to use the Athena service to read the unstructured log file in tabular format in athena by using SQL queries. That will incur Some charges

• We can't see a live generation of logs and client IPs on s3.

By default, the Application web server captures the Load balancer IPs in the Application 

Solution: Capturing live Client IPs on application server logs helps to understand the traffic generation of users

Now, you have understood the Application load balancer use case and Access logs storing methods, which is useful based on the Application mechanism and requirements.

Going through the below steps We can achieve live client IP addresses capturing on the Apache web server logs

Step -1 Create Ec2 instance

Here I have created One Demo Instance

Take ssh access to the instance using the below command

• SSH -i “pemfilename.pem” username@Public_IP

Step 2 - Install the Apache Web server

Step 3 - Start the Apache service 

Step -4 Create the target group

Step- 5 Create an Application load balancer with the listening rule protocol 80

You can check the apache web page by using the DNS endpoint of the Load balancer

Now the Web server access Log files capturing the Load balancer IPs

Step - 6

Now our agenda is to capture the client IP address in these access logs. To achieve this we need to add the %{X-Forwarded-For}i line in the Log format section of the  apache configuration file which is located on the path /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Then save the file, Check the syntax using “httpd -t” command. Then restart the apache service

When I browse the application from the DNS endpoint 

Now you can see my client IP address “106.76.231.153” on the Access logs

conclusion

Now, you have understood the Capturing Client ip on web server logs which is behind load balancer. The main Step is to add X-Forwarded-For in Web server configuration file and ensure that the X-Forwarded-For header attribute is Appended in Load Balancer. This is very useful to analyse live generation of logs.

By Deepak Koppal, Cloud Engineer (Cloud.in)