"Old-fashioned" - or just really good? Why the classic cloud approach is anything but outdated.

Golden images, IaC, ScM and autoscaling - this "classic" cloud approach remains highly relevant for many companies with complex workloads. Especially where scalability, consistency and control are crucial.

Golden Images: The foundation

Golden images are prefabricated images of virtual machines (VMs) that contain the operating system, middleware and basic configurations.

They ensure consistency and reduce the configuration effort when deploying new servers.
In contrast to container images, golden images contain a complete operating system.

IaC: The blueprint

IaC (Infrastructure as Code) enables us to define and manage the entire cloud infrastructure - VMs, networks, load balancers, etc. - in code.

Tools such as Terraform automate the provision and configuration of these resources.
IaC ensures that the infrastructure is reproducible, versioned and automatable.

ScM: The configuration magic

ScM (Software Configuration Management) automates the configuration of the servers provided on the basis of the golden images.

Tools such as Puppet, Ansible or Chef install software, set settings and ensure consistency.
Important: In accordance with our philosophy, the Golden Images none Stage-specific configuration. This is only added by ScM.

Autoscaling: The elasticity

Autoscaling makes it possible to automatically adapt the number of servers to the load.

Cloud providers offer autoscaling functions to ensure the availability and performance of applications.
IaC defines the autoscaling groups, and ScM configures the servers within these groups.

This is how the workflow works:

IaC provides the infrastructure, including autoscaling groups.
Golden images are used to start the servers in the autoscaling groups.
ScM configures the server stage specifically.
Autoscaling dynamically adjusts the number of servers to the load.

The advantages of this approach are clear:

Scalability: Autoscaling enables high loads to be handled.
Agility: IaC and ScM speed up deployment and configuration.
Consistency: Golden Images and ScM ensure standardized environments.
Control: IaC gives us full control over the infrastructure.

This classic cloud approach is particularly suitable for:

Monolithic applications that cannot simply be broken down into microservices.
Applications with complex configuration requirements.
Companies that require a high level of control over their infrastructure.

Our conclusion: The combination of golden images, IaC, ScM and autoscaling is a robust approach for running even heavyweight enterprise applications reliably, scalably and agilely in the cloud!