Introduction What is the cloud

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1 Overview/Description: Discussion on the benefits of hosting the campus card system in the cloud. Topic will cover a general overview of what the cloud is; how the cloud hosted solution can benefit the campus in cost, management, and reliability; the speed of adding increased resources and redundancy; how Atrium built its system to be cloud based. Introduction Good afternoon and welcome to our session Campus Card Systems in the Cloud On behalf of the Atrium and JSA team, thank you for coming. I m Derek Neely Partner & CTO at V4 Development (an IT consulting firm) In the past I ve worked for hosting providers such as Peak 10 and have worked as an infrastructure architect at Bank of America I was brought onto the Atrium team as the Chief Engineer (Campus Card Solution) responsible for the system infrastructure, design, and architecture. Before we being I would like to thank all of our customers that we have had a privilege working with. What is the cloud So, what is the Cloud? Literal Cloud A cloud is a large collection of very tiny droplets of water or ice crystals. The droplets are so small and light that they can float in the air. Weather Wiz Kids Computer Systems Similar to an actual cloud in the sky, the Cloud in is a large collection of components that while they don t float in the air, they form a Cloud infrastructure. The goal of Cloud Computing is to separate of the application from the OS from the Hardware application operating system memory cpu disk power Old days server example Single physical server with a limited set or resources Hardware failure or need for upgrade Long downtimes to upgrade or potentially rebuild Small history dates back to the 50s/60s with the use of Mainframes use of dumb terminals (nothing more than monitor/keyboard/mouse) all connected to 1 mega machine that would alot CPU/Memory chunks to each terminal for that person to use A modern day version of this would be something like Citrix or Microsoft s

2 Terminal Services and the use of thin clients allow access to software like Microsoft Word, Excel, Photoshop. Install once, allow many users access. in the M.F. world now the division of resources for use in are referred to as LPARs What types of cloud are there? what are they? and who offers them? Different types of Cloud Computing (3 primary cloud) Software as a Service (SaaS) Software that is hosted, managed, and provided to the end user with little or no installation or configuration for the user. Google Docs Gmail Salesforce Basecamp Quickbooks Atrium Campus (Case Study Later) Platform as a Service (PaaS) A platform independent environment to develop and host applications on. Code interpreter and database access. Google App Engine Microsoft Azure Force.com Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Virtual infrastructure/servers hosted independently of the hardware that lies underneath. Rackspace.com Amazon WS or EC2 (Elastic Computing) Google Cloud Platform Peak 10 IaaS Focus How is a Cloud built Several independent physical machines all grouped together and pooled together to provide resources or services for many end users, developers, or virtual infrastructure Examples of hardware and software vendors that are often used SAN/NAS (grouped disks partitioned and shared) Netapp, EMC DB clusters MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle Load balancing (Kemp, Cisco, F5) Virtualization (primary focus) VMWare, Xen, Hyper V Virtualization is the primary component of IaaS (that is separating the OS fromhw)

3 2 Types of Virtualization Client Installed (OS, Linux, Windows) with Client virtualization software VMWare Fusion, Virtualbox are the 2 most common ones This is typically only used for developers or sys admins while developing or needing to work with software that isn t offered for the guest OS Hypervisor Semi OS installed on HW directly (VMWare ESXi?) Management software (vsphere manages the ESXi server) This is the primary means by which virtual servers are deployed and issued by service providers. Hosted instances (Hypervisor) Amazon EC2/Rackspace Cloud pay by usage some give edge servers that provide local instances of your system Good for simple configurations such as site hosting, content providing, basic web applications. Managed Instances Peak 10/Rackspace Managed Cloud Solutions Good for custom infrastructure/complex infrastructure builds. more advanced configurations additional DB redundancy or clusters VPNs firewall/security enhancements external/physical infrastructure tie ins. DR functionality Benefits of using the Cloud So now that all the boring stuff is past us. The overall topic of the session is, so why should I use the Cloud? What is the benefit of it. Hardware independence Scalability Quickly add resources to existing machines Quickly replicate servers/systems Easy geo replication/redundancy Elasticity being able to temporarily scale the infrastructure Agility Being able to support the business needs as they need them. Automation Automate migration/movement of Savings

4 SaaS case study. Atrium customer had reported a $300k return on investment. Physical server vs. Virtual server I took a quick base structure of what the Atrium system currently runs on and spec d out a comparable physical environment using Dell, Kemp, Cisco, Brocade 2 x 2GB (Web Servers) 3 x 4GB (App Servers) 8 x 8GB (DB Servers) 2 Load Balancers 2 Firewalls 2 Network Switches 1 SAN 1 Fibre Switch Fibre cards, cables, network cables, setup and configuration Total HW Cost ~$80,000 for the HW alone Hosting cost of HW: ~ 2,000/mo. Cloud hosting the same overall infrastructure in a private cloud 80 GB of RAM 500 GB of storage 2 Virtual Load Balancers 2 Physical Firewalls (Still Secure Managed) Total: ~ 3,500/mo. Cost Comparison Physical in one year: $80,000 HW + $24,000 hosting = $104,000 Over 3 years: $80,000 HW + $72,000 = $152,000 Virtual in one year: $42,000 Over 3 years: $126,000 Total savings over 3 years = $26,000 Ran estimates over a 3 year period as normal growth at the very least would require upgrades and/or replacement hardware within 3 years and definitely after. Security Overall security concerns regarding cloud systems is not much different than physical ones. Yes, there are a few additional concerns and risks when hosting in a public cloud but for the purposes of our discussions we re primarily focusing on private cloud hosting. CIA Confidentiality (data confidential) Integrity (data has not been tampered with) Availability ( always there and accessible) Multi tenancy Walling off various servers/infrastructures from one another Primary concern of most individuals. Today hypervisors have made this type of concern a thing of the past with not allowing hosts to cross over

5 one another. vshield (vmware) Where is your data? The feel good of pointing at a server and knowing your data is in there Physically insecure? Catastrophy, fire, flood, HW failure *** Atrium Case Study When Atrium came to us to architect their next generation campus card solution we needed to build a system that was robust, fault tolerant, and modular. That is we needed a system that could withstand near 100% uptime, able to scale quickly as we continually add new schools with new requirements, and be able to move the application around with ease. What we wind up doing was implementing all of the primary cloud types (mentioned above) Cloud based card system (SaaS) Atrium itself is a SaaS. The Atrium team continually improves and updates the system with new features and integrations which are all regularly pushed to the end users (the campus) Hosted in a private cloud at Peak 10 (IaaS) Atrium is hosted in 2 private clouds hosted at Peak 10 (1 primary and 1 DR) Its architected in a way however, that depending on the campus requirements, the Atrium system can be hosted completely in our cloud or pieces are modular depending on where the data needs to be stored and maintained. In addition, the individual units within the Atrium cloud infrastructure are clustered together forming mini clouds such that each component are also fault tolerant and scalable. Provides our developers a platform to work on (PaaS) Being that Atrium is the next generation card system, we needed a way to provide our developers an easy way to build and deploy the new features and upgrades regularly. We built the system such that upon code review and QA pass they can quickly deploy their code to all of the servers at once. Ensures all systems are up to date with the latest release and eliminates potential human error when deploying the new features.

6 ========================= Additional Notes: Public /user based Amazon Cloud Storage Amazon EC2 (Elastic computing) Apple icloud Storage and Sync capabilities Google Computing Storage Application hosting Mix and match services (many varieties of the above) Microsoft Storage Private /Enterprise Level Rackspace Cloud Servers Cloud Hosting Peak 10 Cloud Hosting Internal Hosting Build/manage your own HW for the cloud