With the advent of the cloud era, what new challenges does IT operations and maintenance face?

In the era of cloud computing, IT system construction has become an increasingly important part of enterprise development. Business systems and the infrastructure that supports the operation of business systems are usually the primary focus of enterprises. However, the "hero" behind ensuring the healthy operation of the business - the operation and maintenance system is also crucial.

Every time an IT system is transformed, the operation and maintenance system and business assurance are the most difficult parts. At the moment when the current enterprise IT system is transforming to cloud architecture, the operation and maintenance system is once again facing new challenges. So when operating and maintaining a data center, what issues should the operation and maintenance personnel pay attention to?

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In the era of cloud computing, data center operation and maintenance should pay attention to the following points:

1. Pay attention to the trends and difficulties of intelligent automated operation and maintenance

Intelligent automated operation and maintenance is a particularly important trend in the cloud data center era. Public cloud makes infrastructure resources more centralized, and enterprises give up building their own data centers and turn to public cloud, so infrastructure resources are concentrated in the hands of third-party service providers.

This has made enterprise O&M lighter to a certain extent, with more emphasis on upper-layer application O&M, while the heavier back-end infrastructure O&M has been transferred to third-party public cloud service providers. The centralization and quantification of infrastructure O&M have provided a good living space for automated O&M, and the lightweight O&M of the enterprise front-end can even be presented in an intelligent and visualized way through big data.

2. Avoid human errors and cyber threats

Not long ago, a large cloud vendor in China activated a bug due to an operational error by its operations staff, which caused problems for some customers when accessing the official website console and using multiple product functions such as MQ and NAS, causing a significant impact. In fact, in addition to natural disasters and other reasons, some security issues in data center operations are most likely caused by human factors.

In addition to avoiding human errors, network threats should not be underestimated. The centralization of data center resources has gradually made us feel that the trend of large-scale data center failures is becoming more and more obvious. From the perspective of network security, if a vulnerability is exploited, it may cause large data loss or even equipment downtime.

3. Multi-platform integration makes fault point monitoring difficult

Industry insiders say that compared with traditional IT architecture, the management objects of cloud data center operation and maintenance are mainly divided into five categories, namely:

The computer room environment infrastructure includes wind, fire, water, electricity, etc.; various equipment, including storage, servers, network equipment, security equipment and other hardware resources; systems and data, including operating systems, databases, middleware, applications and other software resources and business data; management tools, including infrastructure monitoring software, monitoring software, workflow management platform, reporting platform, SMS platform, etc. It can be seen that the service provided by a cloud data center to the outside world is the result of the integration of multiple services. Therefore, when facing a failure, how to accurately trace the failure point among many services is another issue that operation and maintenance personnel need to pay attention to.

As an indispensable component of cloud computing, cloud operation and maintenance will increasingly demonstrate its importance and become one of the core competitiveness of cloud computing. The next step will be to increase the investment and practice of artificial intelligence in cloud operation and maintenance, integrate data center robots into more operation and maintenance business scenarios, replace traditional manual operations, and provide highly automated and intelligent "unattended" cloud data center operation and maintenance solutions.