Planning for onboarding an existing text summarization service to Azure public cloud

Problem statement: This article is a continuation of an exploration for the proper commissioning of a text summarization service in the Azure public cloud. While the earlier article focused on the technical options available to expand and implement the text summarization service including the algorithm involved and its evaluation and comparison to a similar service on a different cloud, this article is specifically for onboarding the service to Azure public cloud in the most efficient, reliable, available and cost-effective manner. It follows up on the online training taken towards a certification in Windows Azure Fundamentals.

Article: Onboarding a service such as this one in the Azure public cloud is all about improving its deployment, using the proper subscription, planning for capacity and demand, optimizing the Azure resources, monitoring the service health, setting up management group, access control, security and privacy of the services and setting up the pricing controls and the support options. We look at these in more detail now.

Proper subscription: Many of the rate limits, quotas and the availability of services are quite sufficient in the very first tier of subscription. The Azure management console has a specific set of options to determine the scale required for the service.

Resource and Resource groups: The allocation of a resource group, identity and access control is certainly a requirement for the onboarding of a service. It is equally important to use the pricing calculator and TCO calculator in the Azure public cloud to determine the costs. Some back of the envelope calculation in terms of the bytes per request, number of requests per second, the latency, recovery time, recovery point, MTTR, MTBF help with determining the requirements and the resource management.

Optimizing the Azure resources: This is automated. If we are deploying a python Django application and a node.js frontend application, then it is important to make use of api gateway, load balancer, proxy and scalability options, certificates, domain name resources etc. The use of resources specific to the service as well as those that enhance its abilities must be methodically ruled off from the checklist that one can draw from the Azure management portal.

Monitoring the service health: Metrics specific to the text summarization service in terms of the size of the text condensed, the mode of delivery, the number of documents submitted to the system, the load on the service in terms of the distribution statistics and other such metrics will help determine if the service requires additional resources or when something goes wrong. Alerts can be set up for the thresholds so we can remain passive until we get an alert.

Management group, Identity and access control: Even if there is only one person in charge of the service, the setting up of a management group, user and access control formalizes and detaches that person so that anyone else can take on the administrator role.  This option will also help set up registrations and notifications to that account so that it is easier to pass the responsibility around.

Security and privacy: The text summarizations service happens to be a stateless transparent transformer and transfer learning service which does not retain any data from the customer, so it does not need any further actions towards security and privacy. TLS setup on the service and use of proper certificates along with domain names will help keep it compute resource independent.

 Advisor: Azure has an advisor capability that advises on the efficiencies possible with the deployment after the above-mentioned steps have been taken. This helps in streamlining the operations and reducing cost.

Conclusion: The service onboarding feature is critical towards the proper functioning of the service both in terms of its cost and benefits. When the public cloud knowledge center articles are followed up meticulously for the use of the Azure management portal in the deployment of the service, the service is guaranteed to improve its return on investment.