7 Best practices to follow while designing a Cloud Architecture

September 12, 2018

In the previous 8-10 years, cloud computing has evolved a lot cutting across demand for devices, storage, servers, networks, security, architecture etc. The Internet of Everything, increased cloud storage capacity, cloud services, security challenges & more tells the whole story of how the cloud is shaping the future. The cloud computing at present is completely different from what it was a few years ago, and it will be much more evolved in a few years from now.

"We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack." - Scott McNealy, former CEO, Sun Microsystems

While you can move your applications or database on the cloud to benefit from it, but simply moving will not make your life super-easy. Taking advantage of the inherent strengths of the cloud computing requires a well thought out architecture design. A good cloud architecture design forms a backbone of your cloud which starts with smart decisions. Building an effective cloud strategy today might save you from the hassles of tomorrow.

How to design a well-architected cloud?

Here are the 7 best practices to map & define a base for a solid cloud-architecture.

7) Proactive Planning

Always follow a theory that your hardware will fail and be prepared with a mechanism to deal with unknown catastrophes before it strikes you. Like it is said, prevention is better than cure.

Don’t guess your capacity – Eliminate decision guessing your capacity as with a wrong prediction you might sit on expensive resources or might have to deal with performance implications of limited capacity.
Test systems at production scale – Cloud gives you the flexibility to create a production scale test environment to test the systems and you may de-provision the resource when you are finished.
Automate – Automation lowers the risk of design changes. With Automation, you can create and replicate systems which makes your architecture dynamic.
Design Evolutionary Architecture – Rapid changes in a business environment could hinder the decisions to deliver but following best practices, while designing cloud architecture can help you evolve.
Data-driven – Your data can inform you of a choice have to make. In the cloud, you can collect data on the behavior of your application needs and identify what’s best.

6) Security

When running your apps on a cloud or migrating to another cloud, yourprimary concernshould always aim to secure your cloudenvironment. Don’t think security only at the firewall level, you can harden the security at all layers within your infrastructure. Discovering and hardening security layers will help you protect your cloud, data from unauthorized actions, destructive forces or breach. Protect your Data Focus on your data protection

Classify Data in different segments (Public, Private, Shared)
Encrypt Data
Create a log of all details
Create policies to prevent Accidental overwrites/deletes/changes

Follow Access Specifiers You are responsible for securing your data, OS, and application. It is always advisable to not use admin or root logins unless required.

Make Password Logging policies
Use Credential or keys Management services
Enable Multi-factor authentication
Limit access to your apps/data from apps or 3rd party tools
Assign Least privilege access system

Protect your Infrastructure Take a detailed assessment of your infra from polices to patches.

Patches/antivirus/firewall at your instances – Harden your security with all the individual OS patches on a regular basis, use antivirus and firewalls to protect your infrastructure.
Traceability – Check the ports, layers, and trace on how someone can hack into an environment. Always perform periodic checks and identify loop-holes.

Create/manage the logs

Response to security events – You should be aware of everything and responsible for all the security events such as 2FA, SSH, encryption, authenticity etc.
Automate Security – Automate your security at all events, you can set notifications, emails whenever someone accesses the cloud.

5) Reliability

Before building a house, you ensure that the foundation is reliable, similarly before architecting your cloud, you should follow best practices. Your system should have the ability to recover from an outage and dynamically meet demands. Your system should technically work in every scenario.

Think of how you can recover from failure – You can design automated recovery process and anticipate failures. You should be aware of how failures can occur and how to respond.
Design a highly available architecture – Do not share a common point of failure and set up a redundant architecture to avoid downtime.
Stop guessing capacity – Guessing can either make under-provision or over provision, either you might have an outage, or your systems may be left sitting idle.
Use a Redundant network – A redundant network can eliminate network failures.
Follow processes – Always create a process to make any changes in monolithic architectures covering changes in demand, monitoring resources and executing.

4) Performance Efficiency

Designing your environmentwith a right platform and in the right way can help you achieve performance benefits. The question is how efficiently can you manage your compute resources to meet your requirements?

Use Latest Technologies - Build your applications and services on an evolved platform. High-performance environment and templates can give you an advantage of a better performing cloud.
Implement Automation - With automation in place, you get the ability to experiment more often and minimize manual processes.
Right-sized – Choose the right services and examine your environment on what services are best suitable to match your demands.
Listen to your application – A cloud service you chose yesterday might not be the best today based on your evolving requirements. Identify your applications resource requirements such as RAM, CPU, Storage etc. If your application is I/O intensive, then you should have the most appropriate storage solution.

3) Cost Optimization

The rising competition in the market could hinder the ability to grow. To cope up with the environment businesses require to optimize their spend and increase performance. With cloud cost optimization strategies, you can reduce your cost to a minimum and use savings to serve your business. Following this system allows you to achieve benefits while still giving results to your business.

Use Managed Services – You can remove the operational burden of management and maintenance of the infrastructure by taking the services of a cloud-managed service provider. This will help you in an efficient architecture while lowering the cost of ownership.
A shift from CapEx to Opex – Don’t invest heavily on a bunch of hardware resource that you don’t require. With the cloud, your CapEx could shift to Opex, enjoy the benefits of scalability, redundancy, reliability.
Price to performance ratio – A price to performance ratio portrays the ability to deliver, cloud resources with lower price and higher performance is always desirable.
Functionality model – Attribute expense to the functionality and cloud resources which you require while dropping the services or replacing it with better alternates.

2) Operational Excellence

Effective operations preparation drives excellence. You should follow the practices and procedures to manage workloads.

Align processes – Automate operations with code.
Metrics – Collect metrics from various resources and align processes on the business needs.
Make Incremental changes – Instead of making changes in big packages always follow an approach to make small incremental changes, this is best to avoid failure in case of unexpected events and identify the root cause.
Unexpected events – Always test for unforeseen circumstances. Capture events and failure and design a room for improvements.
Maintain documentation – Keep your procedures, documentation up to date & avoid any delays which may be useful for understanding and troubleshooting purposes.

1) Multi-Cloud Approach

There’s no one size that fits all. A true multi-cloud strategy allows you to migrate to other clouds and/or run the services balanced between two or more clouds. By planning a multi-cloud strategy you have the complete flexibility to achieve the best price to performance ratio without compromising the functionality& interoperability.

Avoid vendor native services – Getting into a trap of native services will be easy in the short run but difficult in the long run when your cloud expands. It’s always good to utilize open-source replacements for any native service that you could replace. Right from the start when you use open-source or replacements, you experience flexibility with varied services without being stuck with native services.
Design Tailored environment – A customized cloud could extract the maximum from your cloud with the ability of hybridization, multi-cloud and freedom to use applications, resulting in a more tailored & cost-effective solution as unique as your business.
Right-Mix – Identify the best of both worlds with your requirements. A service you might be getting with a cloud provider might be better performing on the other. Check responsiveness of services and create a right blend for your business across multiple clouds.

These are some of the common best practices that you can follow to design and architect your cloud applications and database. Each business is unique and therefore require an expertise in designing and maintain the cloud. E2E Networks has years of experience and expertise in designing and architecting cloud solutions. Contact us to set up, architect, migrate, secure, operate and continually optimize your cloud for tangible business results. Our dedicated team and support empower your IT team by giving time and resources back. We strive to take the responsibilities to ensure that customer applications are put in the right environment at the right cost. Contact us for more information on how we can provide you with the cost advantage while enhancing your performance.

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November 4, 2024

A Complete Guide To Customer Acquisition For Startups

Any business is enlivened by its customers. Therefore, a strategy to constantly bring in new clients is an ongoing requirement. In this regard, having a proper customer acquisition strategy can be of great importance.

So, if you are just starting your business, or planning to expand it, read on to learn more about this concept.

The problem with customer acquisition

As an organization, when working in a diverse and competitive market like India, you need to have a well-defined customer acquisition strategy to attain success. However, this is where most startups struggle. Now, you may have a great product or service, but if you are not in the right place targeting the right demographic, you are not likely to get the results you want.

To resolve this, typically, companies invest, but if that is not channelized properly, it will be futile.

So, the best way out of this dilemma is to have a clear customer acquisition strategy in place.

How can you create the ideal customer acquisition strategy for your business?

Define what your goals are

You need to define your goals so that you can meet the revenue expectations you have for the current fiscal year. You need to find a value for the metrics –

MRR – Monthly recurring revenue, which tells you all the income that can be generated from all your income channels.
CLV – Customer lifetime value tells you how much a customer is willing to spend on your business during your mutual relationship duration.
CAC – Customer acquisition costs, which tells how much your organization needs to spend to acquire customers constantly.
Churn rate – It tells you the rate at which customers stop doing business.

All these metrics tell you how well you will be able to grow your business and revenue.

Identify your ideal customers

You need to understand who your current customers are and who your target customers are. Once you are aware of your customer base, you can focus your energies in that direction and get the maximum sale of your products or services. You can also understand what your customers require through various analytics and markers and address them to leverage your products/services towards them.

Choose your channels for customer acquisition

How will you acquire customers who will eventually tell at what scale and at what rate you need to expand your business? You could market and sell your products on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or invest in paid marketing like Google Ads. You need to develop a unique strategy for each of these channels.

Communicate with your customers

If you know exactly what your customers have in mind, then you will be able to develop your customer strategy with a clear perspective in mind. You can do it through surveys or customer opinion forms, email contact forms, blog posts and social media posts. After that, you just need to measure the analytics, clearly understand the insights, and improve your strategy accordingly.

Combining these strategies with your long-term business plan will bring results. However, there will be challenges on the way, where you need to adapt as per the requirements to make the most of it. At the same time, introducing new technologies like AI and ML can also solve such issues easily. To learn more about the use of AI and ML and how they are transforming businesses, keep referring to the blog section of E2E Networks.

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Reference Links

https://www.helpscout.com/customer-acquisition/

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/customer-acquisition-strategy-for-startups/

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-acquisition

This is a decorative image for: Constructing 3D objects through Deep Learning

October 18, 2022

Image-based 3D Object Reconstruction State-of-the-Art and trends in the Deep Learning Era

3D reconstruction is one of the most complex issues of deep learning systems. There have been multiple types of research in this field, and almost everything has been tried on it — computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning, but to no avail. However, that has resulted in CNN or convolutional neural networks foraying into this field, which has yielded some success.

The Main Objective of the 3D Object Reconstruction

Developing this deep learning technology aims to infer the shape of 3D objects from 2D images. So, to conduct the experiment, you need the following:

Highly calibrated cameras that take a photograph of the image from various angles.
Large training datasets can predict the geometry of the object whose 3D image reconstruction needs to be done. These datasets can be collected from a database of images, or they can be collected and sampled from a video.

By using the apparatus and datasets, you will be able to proceed with the 3D reconstruction from 2D datasets.

State-of-the-art Technology Used by the Datasets for the Reconstruction of 3D Objects

The technology used for this purpose needs to stick to the following parameters:

Input

Training with the help of one or multiple RGB images, where the segmentation of the 3D ground truth needs to be done. It could be one image, multiple images or even a video stream.

The testing will also be done on the same parameters, which will also help to create a uniform, cluttered background, or both.

Output

The volumetric output will be done in both high and low resolution, and the surface output will be generated through parameterisation, template deformation and point cloud. Moreover, the direct and intermediate outputs will be calculated this way.

Network architecture used

The architecture used in training is 3D-VAE-GAN, which has an encoder and a decoder, with TL-Net and conditional GAN. At the same time, the testing architecture is 3D-VAE, which has an encoder and a decoder.

Training used

The degree of supervision used in 2D vs 3D supervision, weak supervision along with loss functions have to be included in this system. The training procedure is adversarial training with joint 2D and 3D embeddings. Also, the network architecture is extremely important for the speed and processing quality of the output images.

Practical applications and use cases

Volumetric representations and surface representations can do the reconstruction. Powerful computer systems need to be used for reconstruction.

Given below are some of the places where 3D Object Reconstruction Deep Learning Systems are used:

3D reconstruction technology can be used in the Police Department for drawing the faces of criminals whose images have been procured from a crime site where their faces are not completely revealed.
It can be used for re-modelling ruins at ancient architectural sites. The rubble or the debris stubs of structures can be used to recreate the entire building structure and get an idea of how it looked in the past.
They can be used in plastic surgery where the organs, face, limbs or any other portion of the body has been damaged and needs to be rebuilt.
It can be used in airport security, where concealed shapes can be used for guessing whether a person is armed or is carrying explosives or not.
It can also help in completing DNA sequences.

So, if you are planning to implement this technology, then you can rent the required infrastructure from E2E Networks and avoid investing in it. And if you plan to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the website.

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Reference Links

https://tongtianta.site/paper/68922

https://github.com/natowi/3D-Reconstruction-with-Deep-Learning-Methods

This is a decorative image for: Comprehensive Guide to Deep Q-Learning for Data Science Enthusiasts

October 18, 2022

A Comprehensive Guide To Deep Q-Learning For Data Science Enthusiasts

For all data science enthusiasts who would love to dig deep, we have composed a write-up about Q-Learning specifically for you all. Deep Q-Learning and Reinforcement learning (RL) are extremely popular these days. These two data science methodologies use Python libraries like TensorFlow 2 and openAI’s Gym environment.

So, read on to know more.

What is Deep Q-Learning?

Deep Q-Learning utilizes the principles of Q-learning, but instead of using the Q-table, it uses the neural network. The algorithm of deep Q-Learning uses the states as input and the optimal Q-value of every action possible as the output. The agent gathers and stores all the previous experiences in the memory of the trained tuple in the following order:

State> Next state> Action> Reward

The neural network training stability increases using a random batch of previous data by using the experience replay. Experience replay also means the previous experiences stocking, and the target network uses it for training and calculation of the Q-network and the predicted Q-Value. This neural network uses openAI Gym, which is provided by taxi-v3 environments.

Now, any understanding of Deep Q-Learning is incomplete without talking about Reinforcement Learning.

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement is a subsection of ML. This part of ML is related to the action in which an environmental agent participates in a reward-based system and uses Reinforcement Learning to maximize the rewards. Reinforcement Learning is a different technique from unsupervised learning or supervised learning because it does not require a supervised input/output pair. The number of corrections is also less, so it is a highly efficient technique.

Now, the understanding of reinforcement learning is incomplete without knowing about Markov Decision Process (MDP). MDP is involved with each state that has been presented in the results of the environment, derived from the state previously there. The information which composes both states is gathered and transferred to the decision process. The task of the chosen agent is to maximize the awards. The MDP optimizes the actions and helps construct the optimal policy.

For developing the MDP, you need to follow the Q-Learning Algorithm, which is an extremely important part of data science and machine learning.

What is Q-Learning Algorithm?

The process of Q-Learning is important for understanding the data from scratch. It involves defining the parameters, choosing the actions from the current state and also choosing the actions from the previous state and then developing a Q-table for maximizing the results or output rewards.

The 4 steps that are involved in Q-Learning:

Initializing parameters – The RL (reinforcement learning) model learns the set of actions that the agent requires in the state, environment and time.
Identifying current state – The model stores the prior records for optimal action definition for maximizing the results. For acting in the present state, the state needs to be identified and perform an action combination for it.
Choosing the optimal action set and gaining the relevant experience – A Q-table is generated from the data with a set of specific states and actions, and the weight of this data is calculated for updating the Q-Table to the following step.
Updating Q-table rewards and next state determination – After the relevant experience is gained and agents start getting environmental records. The reward amplitude helps to present the subsequent step.

In case the Q-table size is huge, then the generation of the model is a time-consuming process. This situation requires Deep Q-learning.

Hopefully, this write-up has provided an outline of Deep Q-Learning and its related concepts. If you wish to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

Reference Links

https://analyticsindiamag.com/comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-for-data-science-enthusiasts/

https://medium.com/@jereminuerofficial/a-comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-8aeed632f52f

October 13, 2022

GAUDI: A Neural Architect for Immersive 3D Scene Generation

The evolution of artificial intelligence in the past decade has been staggering, and now the focus is shifting towards AI and ML systems to understand and generate 3D spaces. As a result, there has been extensive research on manipulating 3D generative models. In this regard, Apple’s AI and ML scientists have developed GAUDI, a method specifically for this job.

An introduction to GAUDI

The GAUDI 3D immersive technique founders named it after the famous architect Antoni Gaudi. This AI model takes the help of a camera pose decoder, which enables it to guess the possible camera angles of a scene. Hence, the decoder then makes it possible to predict the 3D canvas from almost every angle.

What does GAUDI do?

GAUDI can perform multiple functions –

The extensions of these generative models have a tremendous effect on ML and computer vision. Pragmatically, such models are highly useful. They are applied in model-based reinforcement learning and planning world models, SLAM is s, or 3D content creation.
Generative modelling for 3D objects has been used for generating scenes using graf, pigan, and gsn, which incorporate a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). The generator codes radiance fields exclusively. Using the 3D space in the scene along with the camera pose generates the 3D image from that point. This point has a density scalar and RGB value for that specific point in 3D space. This can be done from a 2D camera view. It does this by imposing 3D datasets on those 2D shots. It isolates various objects and scenes and combines them to render a new scene altogether.
GAUDI also removes GANs pathologies like mode collapse and improved GAN.
GAUDI also uses this to train data on a canonical coordinate system. You can compare it by looking at the trajectory of the scenes.

How is GAUDI applied to the content?

The steps of application for GAUDI have been given below:

Each trajectory is created, which consists of a sequence of posed images (These images are from a 3D scene) encoded into a latent representation. This representation which has a radiance field or what we refer to as the 3D scene and the camera path is created in a disentangled way. The results are interpreted as free parameters. The problem is optimized by and formulation of a reconstruction objective.
This simple training process is then scaled to trajectories, thousands of them creating a large number of views. The model samples the radiance fields totally from the previous distribution that the model has learned.
The scenes are thus synthesized by interpolation within the hidden space.
The scaling of 3D scenes generates many scenes that contain thousands of images. During training, there is no issue related to canonical orientation or mode collapse.
A novel de-noising optimization technique is used to find hidden representations that collaborate in modelling the camera poses and the radiance field to create multiple datasets with state-of-the-art performance in generating 3D scenes by building a setup that uses images and text.

To conclude, GAUDI has more capabilities and can also be used for sampling various images and video datasets. Furthermore, this will make a foray into AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). With GAUDI in hand, the sky is only the limit in the field of media creation. So, if you enjoy reading about the latest development in the field of AI and ML, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

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Reference Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362323995_GAUDI_A_Neural_Architect_for_Immersive_3D_Scene_Generation

https://www.technology.org/2022/07/31/gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation/

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2022/08/apple-has-unveiled-gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation.html