GURU NANAK INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT

(AFFILIATED TO GURU GOBIND SINGH INDRAPRASTHA UNIVERSITY)

Cloud Computing

PRACTICAL FILE

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

PROF. SHUBHRA TARAN PREET
SAGGAR (PROFESSOR) SINGH
MCA(3rd Sem)
50413004421
 CLOUD COMPUTING Practical

S No Title Of Experiment Pg. no.

1 Create an word document of your class time table and store 1-2
locally and on cloud with doc and pdf format in Googel Drive.

2 Create an account in ZOHO and add spread sheet of 3-5

Marksheet using its Docs services

3 Prepare a ppt on cloud computing- introduction, models, services 6-8

and architecture using ZOHO

4 Create your resume in a neat format using Google / Zoho cloud 9-10

5 Install Virtualbox/VMware Workstation with different flavours of 11-23

linux or windows OS on top of windows7 or 8.

6 Install a C compiler in the virtual machine created using virtual 24-31

box and execute Simple Programs

7 Install Google App Engine. Create hello world app and 32-36
other simple web applications using python/java

8 Case study on Amazon EC2 37-40

9 Case study on Microsoft Azure 41-47

10 Case study on Google Cloud Platform 48 - 53

Q1. Create an word document of your class time table and store locally and on the
cloud with doc,and pdf format . (use docs.google.com)

1. Create a new document

You can create a new document right in

Docs or in Google Drive. In Docs, click

Create new document.

In Drive, click New > Google Docs > Blank document or From a template.

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1. Selecting a template

2. Creating Your Own File

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Q2. Create an account in ZOHO and add spread sheet of Marksheet using its Docs
services

1. Creating an ZOHO account.

2. Signing up

3
3. Mapping towards ZOHO Sheets

4. Creating New Sheet

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5. Creating Marksheet

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Q3. Prepare a ppt on cloud computing- introduction, models, services and architecture
using ZOHO

1. Creating an ZOHO account.

2. Signing up

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3. Mapping towards ZOHO Show

4. Create New File

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5. Selecting Template

6. Creating PPT

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Q4. Create your resume in a neat format using Google / Zoho cloud.

1. Create a new document

You can create a new document right in

Docs or in Google Drive. In Docs, click

Create new document.

In Drive, click New > Google Docs > Blank document or From a template.

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2. Selecting Template

3. Creating Resume

Taran Preet Singh

10
Q5. Install Virtualbox/VMware Workstation with different flavours of linux or windows
OS on top of windows7 or 8.

Cloud Computing

 Installation Guide
 Virtual Box
 Ubuntu

NAME: Taran Preet Singh

Enrollment No: 50413004421
Email: taranpreet2600@gmail.com

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 Install VirtualBox
VirtualBox runs on Windows machines, Macs, Windows and Linux machines, so
you'll be able to install ubuntu in just about any platform. download it, and install it.
No special instructions needed.

1.

2.

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3.

4.

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5.

6.

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7.

8.

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 Get the Ubuntu Technical Preview ISO File

When you go there, click "Get started," and follow the instructions and prompts until
you finally get to the download page. Choose your language and whether you want
to download the 32-bit or 64-bit version. I downloaded the 64-bit version, because I
installed it on a 64-bit machine.

1) Start the installation

Run VirtualBox and click the New icon on the upper-left side of the
machine. From the screen that appears, type Ubuntu in the name field.
Then from the Version drop-down box, select Ubuntu, and choose
either the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on the ISO you
downloaded.

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2) Select the amount of RAM
Next you'll be prompted to select how much RAM you want to devote
to your Ubuntu virtual machine. You'll be shown a recommended
amount of RAM. You can change it if you want, but I've used
VirtualBox for several years and have created many virtual machines,
and I've found its recommendations to be on target. So unless you
know what you're doing and have a very good reason to change it,
accept the recommendation.

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3) Create a Virtual Hard Drive
In order to install Ubuntu, you'll have to create a virtual hard drive for
installing it.

4) Select your ISO as the start-up disk

. You'll be asked to "Select start-up disk." Head to where you
downloaded the Ubuntu ISO file, click "Start," and the installation
begins.

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5) Several Other Windows Of Installation

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20
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6) Finish installing Ubuntu
From here on in, it's just like any normal Windows installation, with the
usual occasional reboots. The reboots happen inside VirtualBox, not
on your machine itself.

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7) After Rebooting Virtual Machine To a Fresh Start

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Q6. Install a C compiler in the virtual machine created using virtual box and execute Programs

Aim :

To install a C compiler in the virtual machine and execute a sample program.

Procedure:

step1:
Install the centos or ubuntu in the opennebula as per previous commands.

Step 2:
Login into the VM of installed OS.

Step 3:
If it is ubuntu then, for gcc installation
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gcc-6 gcc-6-base

Step 4:
Write a sample program
like Welcome.cpp
#include<iostream.h>
using namespace
std; int main()
{
cout<<”Hello
world”; return 0;
}

Step 5:
First we need to compile and link our program. Assuming the source code is saved in a file
welcome.cpp, we can do that using GNU C++ compiler g++, for example
g++ -Wall -o welcome welcome.cpp

And output can be executed by

./welcome
https://www.iitk.ac.in/nt/faq/vbox.htm

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 1. What is GCC compiler?
2. Explain the uses of VM.

Result:
Thus the GCC compiler has been successfully installed and executed a sample program

INSTALL GOOGLE APP ENGINE

Aim :
To Install Google App Engine. Create hello world app and other simple web
applications using python/java.

Procedure:

Use Eclipse to create a Google App Engine (GAE) Java project (hello world
example), run it locally, and deploy it to Google App Engine account.

Tools used:

1. JDK 1.6
2. Eclipse 3.7 + Google Plugin for Eclipse
3. Google App Engine Java SDK 1.6.3.1

Note
GAE supports Java 1.5 and 1.6.
P.S Assume JDK1.6 and Eclipse 3.7 are installed.

1. Install Google Plugin for Eclipse

Read this guide – how to install Google Plugin for Eclipse. If you install the Google App
Engine Java SDK together with “Google Plugin for Eclipse“, then go to step 2, Otherwise,
get
the Google App Engine Java SDK and extract it.

2. Create New Web Application Project

In Eclipse toolbar, click on the Google icon, and select “New Web Application Project…”

Figure – New Web Application Project

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Figure – Deselect the “Google Web ToolKit“, and link your GAE Java SDK via the
“configure SDK” link.

Click finished, Google Plugin for Eclipse will generate a sample project automatically.

3. Hello World
Review the generated project directory.

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Nothing special, a standard Java web project

HelloWorld
/ src/
...Java source code... META- INF/
...other configuration... war/
...JSPs, images, data files... WEB-INF/
...app configuration... lib/
...JARs for libraries... classes/

Copy

The extra is this file “appengine-web.xml“, Google App Engine need this to run and
deploy the application.

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File : appengine-web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
<application></application>
<version>1</version>

<!-- Configure java.util.logging -->

<system-properties>
<property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties"/>
</system-properties>

</appengine-web-app>

Copy

4. Run it local
Right click on the project and run as “Web Application“.

//...
INFO: The server is running at http://localhost:8888/ 30 Mac 2012 11:13:01 PM
com.google.appengine.tools.development.DevAppServerImpl start INFO: The admin

Copy

Access URL http://localhost:8888/, see

and also the hello world servlet – http://localhost:8888/helloworld

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5. Deploy to Google App Engine
Register an account on https://appengine.google.com/, and create an application ID for your web application.

In this demonstration, I created an application ID, named “mkyong123”, and put it in appengine- web.xml.

File : appengine-web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<appengine-web-app xmlns="">
<application>mkyong123</application>
<version>1</version>

<!-- Configure java.util.logging -->

<system-properties>
<property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties"/>
</system-properties>

</appengine-web-app>
Copy

To deploy, see following steps:

Figure 1.1 – Click on GAE deploy button on the toolbar.

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Figure 1.2 – Sign in with your Google account and click on the Deploy button.

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 Figure 1.3 – If everything is fine, the hello world web application will be deployed to this
URL – http://mkyong123.appspot.com/

Done.

References

Google App Engine – Getting Started: Java

Google app engine Python hello world example using Eclipse

Viva Questions:

1. What is GAE?
2. What is ASP?
3. What is JSP?
4. Expalin the procedure to create the GAE
5. What is SDK?

Result:

Thus the GAE is installed and executed the hello world application.

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 Q7. Install Google App Engine. Create hello world app and other simple web applications using
python/java

HOSTING A STATIC WEBSITE ON GOOGLE APP

ENGINE
Aim:

To use GAE launcher to launch the web applications.

Procedure:

You can use Google App Engine to host a static website. Static web pages can
contain client- side technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Hosting your static
site on App Engine can cost less than using a traditional hosting provider, as App Engine
provides a free tier.

Sites hosted on App Engine are hosted on the REGION_ID.r.appspot.com subdomain,

such as [my-project-id].uc.r.appspot.com. After you deploy your site, you can map your
own domain name to your App Engine-hosted website.

Before you begin

Before you can host your website on Google App Engine:

Create a new Cloud Console project or retrieve the project ID of an existing project to
use: Go to the Project page
Tip: You can retrieve a list of your existing project IDs with the gcloud command line tool.
2. Install and then initialize the Google Cloud
SDK: Download the SDK

Creating a website to host on Google App

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 Engine Basic structure for the project

This guide uses the following structure for the project:

 app.yaml: Configure the settings of your App Engine application.

 www/: Directory to store all of your static files, such as HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript.
 css/: Directory to store stylesheets.

 style.css: Basic stylesheet that formats the look and feel of your site.
 images/: Optional directory to store images.
 index.html: An HTML file that displays content for your website.
 js/: Optional directory to store JavaScript files.
 Other asset directories.

Creating the app.yaml file

The app.yaml file is a configuration file that tells App Engine how to map URLs to your
static files. In the following steps, you will add handlers that will load www/index.html
when someone visits your website, and all static files will be stored in and called from
the www directory.

Create the app.yaml file in your application's root directory:

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More reference information about the app.yaml file can be found in the app.yaml
reference documentation.

Create a directory that has the same name as your project ID. You can find your project ID
in the Console.
In directory that you just created, create a file named app.yaml. Edit
the app.yaml file and add the following code to the file:

runtime:
python27
api_version: 1
threadsafe: true

handlers:
- url: /
static_files:
www/index.html upload:
www/index.html

- url: /(.*)
static_files:
www/\1 upload:
www/(.*)

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 Creating the index.html file

Create an HTML file that will be served when someone navigates to the root page of your
website. Store this file in your www directory.

Optional flags:

 Include the --project flag to specify an alternate Cloud Console project ID to what you
initialized as the default in the gcloud tool. Example: --project [YOUR_PROJECT_ID]
 Include the -v flag to specify a version ID, otherwise one is generated foryou.
Example: -v [YOUR_VERSION_ID]

To learn more about deploying your app from the command line, see Deploying a Python 2 App.

Deploying your application to App Engine

When you deploy your application files, your website will be uploaded to App
Engine. To deploy your app, run the following command from within the root
directory of your application where the app.yaml file is located:
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, world!</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/style.css">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
<p>
This is a simple static HTML file that will be served from Google App Engine.
</p>
</body>
</html>

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 Viewing your application

To launch your browser and view the app at

https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com, run the following command:

gcloud app browse

Viva Questions:

1. What is CSS?

2. What is HTML?

Explain about project creation.

Name the optional flags.

What command is used to deploy the

Result

Thus the GAE launcher used to launch the web

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Q8. Case study on Amazon EC2

Studio 4D is a digital visualization firm providing virtual 3D environments for all size architectural
projects – from individual buildings to full city planning. The firm’s goal is to help owners, developers,
and future inhabitants really ‘feel’ what it’s like to experience a project before and during its
development.

The Need For A Solution That Provides an Interactive Video Experience to

Large Audiences
The Studio 4D team needed a solution to provide a cloud-based virtual walkthrough experience for large
audiences (500+) for its interactive demos of architectural environments created and pixel- streamed via
Unreal Engine, an advanced real-time 3D creation platform that Studio 4D leverages to build its virtual
environments.
The pixel-streaming protocol used by Unreal Engine – WebRTC – is an excellent choice for interactive
sessions, and Studio 4D wanted to see if there was a way to maximize it to benefit the great quantity of
observers attending their streaming platform. Studio 4D looked for a solution and reached out to Amazon
Web Services (AWS).
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) sales team searched internally for a partner with the right expertise to
implement video workloads, and if possible one with an early understanding of a new streaming solution
being introduced, Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS). The media team at AWS recommended
TrackIt to the AWS sales team and introductions were made by all parties.
The TrackIt and Studio 4D teams determined that Amazon IVS was indeed the best fit for the
requirements as a backend streaming service.
The choice for a front-end interface to Unreal Engine was still an open question. TrackIt and Studio 4D
decided that a two-track approach presenting distinct options made sense to pursue:
1. Utilizing Zoom as the front-end interface and its ability to output RTMP (IVS’ native video input
protocol)

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♦ Using Zoom has several benefits; it’s very easy to use and well understood and no extra
infrastructure is required to run it.
♦ Zoom does however have some performance implications. It is limited to a 720p output resolution, and
in practice, TrackIt found that actual streaming performance was limited to the 15 frames per second
range.
2. Implement an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Docker instance using FFmpeg to translate
WebRTC to RTMP directly from Unreal Engine itself to serve as the front-end platform.
♦ The benefits of using a direct Unreal Engine connection are Studio 4D’s familiarity with its use and
output at a full 1080p (or greater) at up to 60 frames per second.
♦ Challenges for this approach are the extra resources required (AWS Fargate) and some additional
complexity to managing the presentations – which Studio 4D and TrackIt addressed with some custom front-
end GUI development.

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Implementation of Unreal Engine To IVS Process & Challenges
The development of a Zoom integration with Amazon IVS was a fairly straightforward task; implementing
an API connection to Zoom’s RTMP output and piping it into IVS for streaming to observers. The best
location to run Zoom was determined to be inside an AWS Workspaces instance rather than on a local
machine; it made for a more automated experience and somewhat reduced overall latency and improved the
video performance.
For the direct Unreal Engine to IVS solution, TrackIt built an easy-to-use tool for Studio 4D, creating a React
application that provides the presenter with a simple web interface to create and manage their IVS streams.
The TrackIt team needed to find a means to ‘convert’ the stream coming from Unreal Engine which uses
WebRTC, a modern protocol that provides a video out capability, whereas Amazon IVS only supports/accepts
RTMP for live streaming. To address this challenge, the TrackIt team configured a Docker container running
on AWS Fargate that connects to the live stream from Unreal Engine and uses FFmpeg to broadcast the real-
time audio and video of the stream in high-definition to the Amazon AWS IVS RTMP endpoint.

TrackIt’s Expertise
TrackIt’s work with Studio 4D highlights the TrackIt team’s expertise in implementing online streaming
solutions that leverage the AWS cloud and also in creating web applications tailored to a company’s needs.
The Studio 4D team was very pleased with the knowledge and expertise provided by
the engineers at TrackIt. The company is currently in the process of deploying the online-streaming platform
and expects this newly-implemented solution to exponentially increase the number of people with whom it
can share real-time 3D experiences online.
“Three things stood out to us: For starters, the fact that the TrackIt team showed a background of
global collaboration. We had meetings where there were people in the US and in France. Second,
TrackIt was recommended by AWS itself to be able to help us implement this solution faster. That
really gave us the confidence to leverage their expertise. Third, during the implementation, we went
back and forth and discussed complex issues. It was nice to have someone that could understand
our concerns and answer the questions we had.”
– Hilario Canessa, CEO, Studio 4D

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Q. Would you Recommend TrackIt to other companies looking to implement
similar solutions? Why?
A. Implementing an online streaming solution is not easy. It’s a problem that looks complex and IS
complex. It was really important for us to have someone like the TrackIt team to help us onboard
the online streaming platform onto our existing solution. I think companies in similar situations
should definitely look to take that first step and talk to a company like TrackIt that has the
experience and expertise required to implement such solutions.
– Hilario Canessa, CEO, Studio 4D

Studio 4D’s Challenge

The need for a solution that helps provide low-latency real-time 3D interactive
experiences to large audiences

Solution:
Amazon IVS (Interactive Video Service)

Outcomes:
Online streaming platform implemented enabling the company to provide real-time
interactive 3D experiences to large audiences

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Q9. Case study on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers and a strong competitor of Amazon Web
Services. Microsoft Azure has plenty of features that make it one of the crowd favourites. In this article
let us understand Microsoft Azure, it benefits, applications and use cases.

What is Cloud Computing?

Let us see what the definition of Cloud Computing looks like?

‘Cloud Computing is nothing but a practice of providing Cloud Services (Storage, Computation,
Databases, Security, etc) on rent and also through a network that can be accessed over the internet’

Now that we know what the general definition is, let us understand this concept with an example. To
understand this definition, we need to go some 20 years back from 2020. In the early two thousand, in
order to host an application, we needed to buy stack servers and have skilled professionals to set the
infrastructure up. The process looked simple, but there were drawbacks,

 Servers were costly back then, and they still are

 It was difficult to find skilled professionals
 A lot of efforts went into planning

What this meant was the owner had to pay money in buying servers. Then invest more money in people
who could set it up. The evening after a lot of planning, there was never certainty on how many
resources were enough and how many were too much? As an owner, one would always worry about
money resources, planning and scalability. Hence there was very less time one could devote to
actually focus on business. Also, this meant setting up such business was becoming limited to ones
who could afford it.

This is where Cloud Computing came to save the day. There were service providers in the market that
started providing Compute, Storage, Networking, and other application hosting services on ‘pay as you
go model’. This meant people could rent these services and pay for only those services they used and
only for the time duration they used those for. Also, these services providers managed the
configuration, scalability and management part. In simple terms, this solved all the
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issues we listed above. This process we just discussed, evolved and started to be known as Cloud Computing.

So by now, you should have an understanding of Cloud Computing. Let us go ahead and understand the
next topic

What Is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud service provider that provides cloud computing services like
computation, storage, security and many other domains. Microsoft is one of the global leaders when it
comes to Cloud solutions and global cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure provides services in 60+
global regions and serves in 140 counties. It provides services in the form of Infrastructure as a service,
Platform as a Service and Software as a service. It even provides serverless computing meaning, you just
put your code and all your backend activities as managed by Microsoft Azure.

It easily integrates with Microsoft Products making it very popular using Microsoft products. This platform is
now 10 years old and it picked up to compete with the best of the best.

Let us now go ahead and see what benefits Microsoft Azure offers

Click here to know about Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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Benefits of Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure may be considered second to Amazon Web Services in few features, but it has quite a
few that make it stand tall on its own. Let us take a look at them, one by one

On-Demand Scalability

When we talk of Application Hosting we can never be sure of how many resources are enough and how
many are too much. This is the nature of businesses that rely on varying traffics. What is does is forces
businesses to plan a lot and invest a lot of money doing it. Microsoft Azure helps you save all this effort.

Microsoft Azure ensures your applications and data is distributed well enough that means you never
run short of Server space. It also means your applications do not run on a single server making them
available even in dire situations. Since these resources are properly clustered out and they can scale at
will and in no time, your applications function very differently then they would in an on-premise
architecture.
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Cost Effective

One of the major benefits with cloud service providers is the cut down of upfront costs. Since you can
configure and scale at will, you are not required to invest heavily here. Microsoft Azure ensures small scale
investment does not require upfront costs. Also when it comes to people who have signed up contracts,
they get heavy discounts. It also offers to Pay as go, model, meaning you get cost- cutting in the right
sense.

Hybrid Environments

They say cloud is not a one fit solution for all. It is true indeed because every business will have its own
set of problems. And not all businesses will always be in a state where they can migrate to the cloud
entirely. While other platforms suffer here, as people either have to migrate to those platforms or call
it off totally, Microsoft Azure benefits with its Hybrid approach. Meaning, with Microsoft Azure you can
build Hybrid infrastructures, where your resources can partially reside on the cloud and can partially
operate from an on-premise infrastructure. Hence you are safe from costly workaround.

Big data Applications

Hadoop and Big data are the need of the hour. With data increasing exponentially we need applications
that can help process this data. Microsoft Azure brings this capability of processing large volumes of
data on top of its cloud platform. Azure HDinsight ensures you can use Apache Hadoop as a cloud
solution. This is a power-packed service that lets you deal with large data volumes. That means your
data crunching becomes easier.

It also readily integrates with data visualization tools and also lets you move your data to excel. This
means your data visualization concerns are resolved quickly. With excel you can create visualizations
and with PowerBI integrating with Microsoft Azure your data be converted into any visual that you
require.

Integration Capabilities

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Microsoft has been in the software industry for decades. It has wide reach in the software market and
not many can compete with it when it comes to customer base and stack of products it offers. The
advantage for Microsoft Azure here is that it readily integrates with most of these products. Be it,
connecting to SaaS, PaaS, IaaS applications or even something like Visual Studio or Active Directory,
Microsoft Azure has you covered. Hence you can now leverage ERPs and CRMs to enhance your
business capacity to a greater level.

So should you be worrying if you do not use Microsoft Products. The answer is ‘NO’. You can even
connect to or integrate many third party applications and services to widen your business reach.

Storage and Security

Storage is very critical to any application. It is no different for applications running on cloud. As already
discussed, the volume of data we handle these days is huge. It also comes in different formats and from
different sources. Your Storage resources have to adept enough to handle this data. Microsoft Azure has
you covered here as well It lets you store data in form of files, objects, structured and unstructured data
and a lot more. This happens reliable and securely.

Talking of security Microsoft Azure ensures high level of security for your applications. It ensures all
the resources in Azure cloud are guarded with firewalls and data is moved over the network with
encryption. You have access to authentication and access management meaning you data and
application are secure to the core.

Scheduling and Automation

Everyone hates doing repetitive tasks. What if we could automate mundane tasks or recurring tasks be it
fetching some data, setting up triggers or scaling your resources when needed? Microsoft Azure does
that for you ensuring you can utilise your workforce for more productive outcomes and get rid of
stagnancy or repetition of work.

Data Backup and Recovery

Data Backup ensures you have a copy of your data maintained in case if your primary copy of data or
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resources is lost. With Microsoft Azure, you have an option of backing up your data in different

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Azure regions or data centres. You can maintain as many as six copies of your data. This signifies that
the chance of losing your data on Microsoft Azure is minimal. When it comes to reliability your data is
available 99.9 percent.

So this was About the benefits of Microsoft Azure. Let us go ahead see do customers have to about Microsoft
Azure and what are some of the popular use cases it has to offer to us.

Use Cases of Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has many popular customers out there, here are some use cases for you,

University Of Toronto

This is the largest Canadian university and leads the global front when it comes to research at an
institutional fare. It made use of Microsoft Azure to avoid heavy hardware renewal costs. It migrated
some of its activities to Microsoft Azure Cloud. With it, the university managed to transform IT
processes, saving a lot of time

AkzoNobel

AkzoNobel is a popular Dutch Company that leads way in paint and coating business. It serves in more
than 100 countries and always needs better connectivity across the globe. It harnessed the power of
Microsoft Azure IoT services to improve its performance and connectivity at a global level.

IHG (Intercontinental Hotel Group)

This is one of the largest and leading hotel groups in the world. It owns around 5200 properties across
the globe and serves more than a hundred countries. The fact that you own 5200 properties tells you
the group holds its values of service very truly and also must have experimented a lot to stay up to date
with market needs as well. This fact is also supported by the fact that this group invests a lot of money
in innovations to meet the experience quality the customers deserve.

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The company has many of its tools that require Agile practices. It already was based on Azure Cloud
platform. This is when they decided to use DevOps Services on Microsoft Azure. This not only helped
them bring their software and data handling process on track, but also helped them fortify their security
and processing principles. The fact that Microsoft Azure Supports Hybrid cloud meant big group like
IHG did not have to move to Azure cloud altogether.

Ever since it has moved to Azure StorSimple, which is a hybrid storage service for enterprises. The group
has achieved great results when it comes to storing data. It has helped them save more 70 percent in
terms of cost. This is something that was initiated four years ago. It needed very little support in setting
up and does require too much intervention when it comes to administrative attention.

Before they moved to the above-mentioned service, IHG group had to deal with multiple data and file
services to gather and store data. Azure StorSimple ensured this data was consolidated and easy to
manage overall. Data Backup issue was also resolved as Azure ensured that easy way to get a snapshot
of data. That means data could be backed up easily and quickly.

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Q10. Case study on Google Cloud Platform

Making the case for GitOps

Together with Container Solutions, Slite found the key to its efforts to scale up their delivery capabilities
in a set of practices known as GitOps. It’s an entirely new kind of operational architecture that has found
wide adoption among tech companies, especially in the Cloud Native space.

The core idea behind GitOps is to have the infrastructure setup of your application saved to a version-
control system like Git in a way that lets it be deployed easily and automatically to any given
environment.

By using Git for your deployments, you will have a history of changes with a message for each of them, and
most Git providers like GitHub already have built-in user and access management. This

will take care of some security issues and make it easy for non-engineers to audit your deployment history.

In practice, most organisations will use GitOps with Dockerised applications that are supposed to run on a
Kubernetes cluster with deployment manifests (Kustomize or Helm). Still, in theory, this could work with
any technology that allows for programmable infrastructure.

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The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers various Cloud Native solutions, like Google Kubernetes Engine
(GKE), user and role management, and many more tools to make it quick and easy to get started fully
Cloud Native.

Situationsummary

When Slite brought the Container Solutions team on, it had six engineers actively involved in developing
the platform just as remote work during the pandemic was fueling a huge surge in demand. It needed to
scale infrastructure effectively and to impress new customers with increased business value and powerful
new features, fast.

The company’s product consisted of about 15 microservices, more or less independent from one another,
running on two Kubernetes clusters, for staging and production. Slite had chosen Kubernetes clusters for their
ease of use and availability. And the company chose GKE for user and role management and the simple
integration of its deployment scripts because, as one Slite engineer said, it didn’t “get in the way.” With the
infrastructure taken care of, the engineers could focus on increasing business value.

Additionally, Slite had a separate GCP project with two Kubernetes clusters running development
environments for its engineers to experiment and work on new features.

At the start of our engagement, Slite had some automation in its deployment processes. It used GitHub
Actions scripts to build a Docker image and store it in the Google Image Registry. To deploy the new image,
another GitHub Actions script had to be started manually to make sure the image had been successfully built
and published previously. The deployment itself was handled via Helm, making it easy to share global
configurations and roll back to an older version. The team managed to deploy about four times a day—not
enough to keep up with the new surge in demand for its services.

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Slite uses different services for data storage, such as SQL, BigQuery, and CloudStorage,
depending on the use case.

Embracing GitOps

Since Slite had already split up its product into microservices, it was in a good place to leverage the
advantages of having a fully automated, independent delivery process. It was already using GitHub Actions
to build and deploy, so it felt natural to use the existing tech stack instead of extending it with more tooling,
which would have required more time and effort.

Additionally, using Git, which was already housing all the source code, as the starting point allowed the team
to standardise the release process through all services, to track changes through all environments, and to see
at a glance which version and configuration were running on production at the time.

And finally, this setup could be easily replicated as a template for new projects and services when the
company grows or when teams specialise. (The following diagram shows what the whole thing looks like.)

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Google Cloud solutions

In the new GitOps workflow, the deployment process would be triggered by a change on the master branch to
the source repository, usually through a merged pull request. That would then trigger the existing GitHub
Actions to build a Docker image from the source code and publish it to the Google Container Registry.

With that done, the repository that houses the Helm charts would be updated. Changes to the source code
would usually involve modifying the image tag and/or version number. For changes to the service's
configuration, the Helm chart itself might need to be altered. In any case, these modifications would be easy
to audit by checking the diff.

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On the GKE cluster itself, ArgoCD manages the lifecycle of Slite’s services. ArgoCD is the main tool to
facilitate GitOps, and it’s easy to install with only a Kubernetes manifest or its own operator. For Slite, the
operator was not necessary, as the installation on GKE was simple and straightforward.

ArgoCD takes a configuration manifest like Helm or Kustomize and applies it to a Kubernetes cluster.
If there is an issue during deployment, ArgoCD will continue to sync the current cluster state to the
desired state, as defined in the ops repository.

Additionally, ArgoCD brings an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that can be accessed through the
browser to see and manage the current state of the cluster and the resources managed by ArgoCD. To ensure
only people with the correct permissions can see the cluster states, Slite has integrated the GCP Identity-
Aware Proxy to secure access to ArgoCD.

With the changes in place, Slite achieved a clean split between the image build and deployment processes.
ArgoCD and especially its GUI have also lightened the cognitive load for engineers to monitor their
applications' deployment status, allowing more focus on creating business value. A side benefit is that
engineers are more confident about owning their services all the way to production, as they can now spot,
mitigate, and fix problems in production quickly and independently.

Container Solution’srole

Container Solutions helped Slite automate many routine tasks and equipped the growing company with the
know-how, best practices, and hands-on training to establish GitOps practices. It worked hand-in-hand with
Slite’s engineering team to find the optimal way to implement the GitOps workflow. The underlying Google
Cloud technology solutions were fully implemented in just >six weeks, as Slite hired more engineers.

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Results

The changes have helped Slite further accelerate deployment without putting more infrastructure workload
on the engineering team. Based on this success, Slite is committed to the GitOps pattern and further
improving its tooling.

"Container Solutions's expertise got us up and running on GitOps. It eased team scaling and enabled
much more frequent releases to our customers,” said Arnaud Rinquin, a senior product engineer at Slite.

The team is now so confident about the deployment process that they have fully automated delivery from the
source code to pre-production, which allows them to deploy up to 20 times per day.
Simultaneously, Slite has expanded its engineering team from six to 16 without losing momentum, thanks
to adopting easy-to-use, transparent, and scalable CI/CD. A bug fix can now be in production as soon as 15
minutes after the bug was spotted.

Adopting GitOps for Google Cloud keeps Slite on the growth path and enables it to offer a SaaS product
that amazes its growing user base.

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