Creative Commons licensed image courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/82955120@n05/
Today: Why the cloud: Reasons for a cloud strategy Examples and the ND path Advantages Pitfalls Lessons learned A day in the life of going cloud first
Reasons for a Cloud Strategy
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Frustration
Flexibility (It turns out that searching for Creative Commons licensed images of flexibility leads to strange places...let s stick with text here)
Key terms: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS
Four Notre Dame tests of the cloud 1. www.nd.edu 2. CMS 3. Backups 4. Authentication
www.nd.edu Initial move/test took three days (10/2012) Performance/scalability test results exceeded expectations Reduced complexity/cost Site went live 1/2013
Success
The payoff
Our CMS: Conductor.nd.edu Conductor: ND-developed content management system 435+ web sites 4+ million views/month Hosted in RackSpace - plagued by unstable hardware issues
What we did Employed Elasticache Switched from MySQL server to RDS Began process to enable scaling Externalized data in EBS (and after learning a bit, then in S3) Used sub-account to simplify sysadmin permissions and billing
Faster response at half the cost
Authentication High availability for off-campus students, faculty, and staff Auto failover with Route 53 Client Gateway VPN for Domain Controller sync
Backups Netbackup to manage 300 TB of backups Chose Panzura as cloud storage gateway partner Backing up to S3 Any server restore since summer 2014 being retrieved through Panzura device Able to avoid augmenting/replacing NetApp on premises footprint
Notre Dame s Path to the Cloud https://www.flickr.com/photos/gags9999/
Going Google In January of 2014, we committed to moving our entire campus to Google email. Not everybody was initially delighted.
MarCo mm Training & Support Technic al Project Schedule Spring Summer Fall Planning Convene teams Select migration partner Plan & Report Execution Go Live 1 Go Live 2 Go Live 3 Operationalization Operational/Support Planning Research, Implement Google Groups, Test Integrations, Provisioning, Routing Execution Core IT Team (~25 ppl) Early Adopters (5%) Full Campus Transition (95%) Operationalization Operational/Support Planning Execution Operationalization Planning Preparatory Training Go Live Operational Back-to-School Planning Execution Operationalization Planning Awareness/ Excitement Transactional/Tr aining Communication Go Live Operational Back-to-School Commencement (May 18) Classes start (Aug 26)
Migration Stats Early Adopter Full Campus Total Number of accounts migrated 824 15,449 16,273 Amount of data migrated 1.5 TB 9.1 TB 10.6 TB Number of items migrated 17.2 million 88.5 million 105.7 million
In the end. We decommissioned 24 physical servers, resulting in hardware savings realized over three years. We recovered 60 TB of storage (which we immediately used elsewhere) We decreased staff dedicated to email, freeing resources to use elsewhere
https://www.flickr.com/photos/eleaf/ Ok, so now what?
The ND Cloud First initiative
Cloud Advantages
Better infrastructure https://www.flickr.com/photos/55229469@n07/
http://imgur.com/a/vsnou https://www.flickr.com/photos/14833125@n02/ Pay for what you need, not how the vendor sizes the product
A chance to start clean(er) https://www.flickr.com/photos/95072945@n05/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vibrant/ Quickly adapt to demand
And that s not just IaaS - Purchase and support SaaS solutions quickly - Leverage vendor s ability to scale - Pay for what you need as you need it - Allow groups to experiment more easily
Spend less time doing (some types of) support https://www.flickr.com/photos/aigle_dore/
Spent more time adding value SaaS: integration and customer support PaaS: Customization IaaS: Scripted builds Horizontal auto-scaling Optimization
Take a deep breath It s not all roses. There are pitfalls!
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Pitfalls https://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuatreenp/
Buy-in - Executive - Financial - Technical staff - Business staff and partners - Cloud vendor partners really help too
Organizational strain points - Process - Training and expertise - Inter-organizational stress points - In-organization stress points - Budget models - Trust
Changing cost models Capital costs change to operating expenses Servers and storage actually cost Scaling instead of figuring out problems costs Understanding cost centers is important Financial responsibility gets delegated deeper down the stack
Bad design choices How you integrate How you scale How you monitor (or don t) Financial models And many more...
Not everything translates well The metaphors and management structures may be different Separation of duties may have to change Basic assumptions that used to work can cause problems
Some workloads may not make sense (yet) - Really custom applications and systems - Places where latency may be an issue - If local access or control is required (or mandated) - Things that only scale by making the hardware bigger - If there are regulatory requirements (but that s changing quickly)
Now is the time to change how you think about datacenters and infrastructure
A new way of thinking...
We don t have to build our own castles anymore most of the time. https://www.flickr.com/photos/flissphil/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sis/
And then a DBA walks in the door and says: Hey, you can t do that with data! This actually happened.
Ok! So what do we do? - Leverage the cloud where it makes sense - Learn through doing and build confidence - Look at where your big spends are - people, time, money - Compare that to where you could save - Get some buy-in at the top to try this newfangled cloud thing
Questions? https://www.flickr.com/photos/56218409@n03/