Posted on: 21 06 2023.

How Comtrade 360 Helps Businesses Grow with Cloud Computing

Author: Jurij Balant, Senior Systems Engineer at Comtrade 360

How Comtrade 360 Helps Businesses Grow with Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses store, manage, and utilize data, offering a powerful suite of tools for resource optimization and business growth. With servers located globally, the cloud provides robust and reliable infrastructure, ensuring data is accessible and secure. This blog will delve into how Comtrade 360 leverages the power of cloud technologies to drive our clients’ businesses forward. With the rise of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), businesses can manage cloud resources with unprecedented agility, speed, and repeatability, further cutting down costs and enhancing efficiency. We’ll discuss how adopting cloud services, and their built-in APIs can save your company both time and money, and how it can enable your team to focus more on core business activities, thereby driving growth that’s efficient and reliable. Join us for the first part of this enlightening blog series where we unpack the dynamic landscape of cloud technologies and demonstrate how you can harness them for your business’s success.

1. Cloud Platforms We Use

At Comtrade 360, we use all major public cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as private cloud providers like OpenStack and hybrid clouds, which allows us to provide more comprehensive and flexible solutions to our partners, reducing risk and increasing their competitiveness in the market.

Our approach is customer-centric, and we strive to provide the best solution for each individual customer, based on their specific needs. Our services include setting up core cloud infrastructure and providing support and expertise for granular business requirements, such as developing cloud-native software solutions.

2. Tools We Use to Build and Maintain Cloud-Based Infrastructure

By leveraging the API options provided by major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, enables us to maximize the potential of industry-standard Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Ansible, in addition to harnessing the power of native CLI and SDK APIs offered by these cloud providers.

Utilizing Terraform, we can define and manage our cloud infrastructure as code, enabling version control, collaborative development, and seamless rollbacks. By employing its declarative language, HCL, we can specify the desired end state of our infrastructure, allowing Terraform to automatically generate a corresponding execution plan. This streamlines the provisioning and management process, ensures infrastructure consistency, and significantly reduces human error.

Ansible, on the other hand, excels at configuration management and software deployment. Its agentless architecture simplifies the setup process, as there are no agents to install on target systems. Utilizing a combination of YAML-based playbooks and Jinja2 templates, Ansible enables us to automate tasks across a wide array of cloud resources. Moreover, its idempotent nature ensures that tasks are only executed when necessary, maintaining the desired state while minimizing unintended consequences.
Integration with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools such as Jenkins, GitLab, and GoCD, is crucial for achieving increased agility, reliability, and speed when working with cloud solutions. By automating build, test, and deployment stages, these CI/CD tools streamline the software development lifecycle, facilitating a rapid feedback loop and enabling rapid iteration.

Jenkins, an extensible open-source automation server, supports a wide range of plugins, catering to various cloud providers and their services. This versatility allows for smooth integration with our IaC and configuration management tools, ensuring seamless deployments.

GitLab, an all-in-one DevOps platform, encompasses source code management, CI/CD, and monitoring features. Leveraging its robust integration with Terraform and Ansible, we can effectively manage our cloud infrastructure and application lifecycle within a single platform, resulting in a streamlined workflow and reduced complexity.

GoCD, a powerful open-source CI/CD server, emphasizes pipeline modeling and visualization, providing valuable insights into the software delivery process. Its compatibility with Terraform and Ansible enables efficient infrastructure provisioning and application deployment, contributing to our overall cloud management capabilities.

We are also investigating the potential benefits of incorporating Morpheus and Rundeck into our cloud management strategy. Morpheus, a unified multi-cloud management platform, provides a single pane of glass for managing and deploying cloud workloads across multiple providers. By integrating with Terraform and Ansible, Morpheus facilitates streamlined IaC deployment and configuration management, further enhancing our ability to manage complex cloud environments.

3. Conclusion

At Comtrade 360, we use all major cloud platforms and industry-standard tools to deliver the best solution for each customer’s needs. By leveraging cutting edge cloud computing infrastructure and services, we help our customers save time, resources, and costs, allowing them to focus on their core business and achieve growth more easily and reliably.

Dive deeper into the intricate details of the technologies we use and how we leverage them to empower our clients’ growth in the next installment of this blog series.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Business growth, On-premises infrastructure, Cloud infrastructure, Backup and recovery, Disaster recovery, Resource optimization, AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, Hybrid cloud, Cloud-native software solutions, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, GitLab, CI/CD, Morpheus, Rundeck, Multi-cloud management, Cloud services APIs, Observability