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Everyone is talking about it: Cloud is the next big thing in IT. But what are the results your business should expect from cloud adoption? What are the keys to making it work? What are the pitfalls you should avoid? In this talk driven by our experience working with cloud adopters, we'll show that successfully adopting Cloud is a process that actively involves IT and business units, and we’ll be sure to consider and reconcile both perspectives. This is a talk 100% driven by customer stories, delivered by Sebastian Stadil for the December 3rd 2013 Virtual Build a Cloud Day event.
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Key considerations when adopting the cloud
Expectations Hurdles
About me
• Sebastian Stadil (@sebastianstadil)
• Founded the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group
• Founded Scalr
• Talk to me: [email protected]
About Scalr (1)
• Cloud Management company
• In business for the past 6 years
About Scalr (2)
• Customer driven company – We listen to / interview customers – Learn from them and the problems they face – Find and implement solutions with them
• Talk to us: www.scalr.com
This talk: What you should expect (1)
• This talk is driven by experience
• Problems we’ve seen
• Problems we’ve solved
This talk: What you should expect (2)
• 100%: Real-life examples that our customers have been through – And horror stories!
• 0%: Nonsense
This talk: What you should expect (3)
• Why cloud? Your end goals • What hurdles? What you should expect
YOUR END GOALS What are the promises of the cloud?
Why get cloud?
• Two reasons – Agility – Cost
#1: AGILITY What are the promises of the cloud?
Agility (1)
• Reduce time to market
Agility (2)
• Cloud promise: Developers don’t have to wait on IT.
• What you expect: – Code: “Days instead of months” – Hardware: “Minutes instead of weeks” – Incident response: “Seconds instead of hours”
Agility (3)
• Check out Adrian Cockcroft’s (Netflix) “Dystopia As a Service” talk
#2: COST What are the promises of the cloud?
Cost (1)
• Pay less for the same end user experience
Cost (2)
• Cloud promise: The same service will cost less to run, but give the same performance
• What you expect: – Higher average usage, lower overall capacity – How? Autoscaling, different services evening
out
THE HURDLES ALONG YOUR WAY
What you’ll get
What hurdles?
• Education about cloud • Strategy for cost accountability • Strategy for security & compliance
#1: CLOUD EDUCATION Is your team trained?
Education
• Are your developers and IT people familiar with cloud intricacies?
• Are they embracing the architectures that work? Rejecting those that don’t?
Examples of cloud best practices
• When an instance is gone, it’s gone.
• Build for failure and Think “Cattle, not pets”
• Adopt appropriate tooling (e.g. Chef)
CUSTOMER STORY
Customer story (1)
• Enterprise IT at BigCo (no names!) doesn’t like the idea of a instance being gone
Customer story (2)
• Terminated instances stay around for a “few minutes” – Undo for the cloud!
• The API says the instance is terminated. Except it’s not.
Customer story (3)
• Good luck transferring those volumes for your database promotion – They look detached but are still being written to!
• You can’t design for failure – If MySQL is malfunctioning, better figure out why
and fix it: replacing it isn’t going to happen – “Pets, not cattle” : (
Customer story (4)
• Consequences: – IT was unhappy because cloud wasn’t
delivering the results they wanted – Developers were unhappy because cloud
wasn’t working
LESSONS LEARNED
Cloud is not (only) a technology
• It’s about changing the way your company works – Cloud is usually associated with DevOps
Cloud users need education
• Developers should build cloud architectures
• IT should approve of cloud architectures
• Devs and IT should work together on operating those
Remember
• It’s not about whether it’s “hard”
• It’s about whether your company is adopting cloud practices
#2: YOUR STRATEGY FOR COST MANAGEMENT
How will you rein in runaway costs?
Cost management problems using cloud
• VM sprawl • Oversized VMs
• And you don’t control who launches what
VM Sprawl
• Idle VMs that don’t get terminated – They stick around unused
• You’re afraid to terminate – Maybe the VM is running a non-resource
intensive yet critical task!
Oversized VMs
• Using 64 gigs of RAM on a development VM? No problem!
• There’s no incentive for developers to get smaller VMs – Devs would waste a few precious seconds
waiting on a package install, and there is absolutely no upside
Why can’t you stop it?
• You don’t know who owns a resource
• If you did, you could: – Hold them accountable for those costs – Ask them whether it’s OK to downsize /
terminate
CUSTOMER (HORROR) STORY
Customer Story (1)
• The company had a yearly budget for cloud
• One developer provisioned many many VMs, and forgot about them
Customer Story (2)
• The company needed two full weeks to realize what was going on
• They used up their yearly budget in a month
Customer Story (3)
• This happened on a Public Cloud
• On a Private Cloud, we’ve seen customers buying new hardware every month to “support growth”
LESSONS LEARNED
It’s not about carelessness
• The entire IT department knew that there was VM sprawl going on – Although maybe not at this scale
• But there was nothing they could do about it – Who do you ask before terminating a VM?
You need a strategy for cost accountability
• The objective is the ability to look at a resource (instance, volume…) and say: – “This resource is used by project A for service
B. Services C and D depend on B. The resource is owned by developer E.”
Start with tagging everything
• Asking developers to tag everything is a start
• But they might not want to spend the time
• It’s better to automate through your cloud management service
Apply industry standard methods (1)
• Fight VM Sprawl with lease management – You know the owner, so you know who to
contact about lease expiry!
Apply industry standard methods (2)
• Fight oversized VMs and deployments with accountability – You know the project that’s responsible for
those costs! – Showback, Chargeback
#3: YOUR STRATEGY FOR SECURITY AND GOVERNANCE
How will you ensure security and compliance?
Two objectives to consider
• Keeping the bad guys out
• Letting the good guys in
Two tools
• Network security
• Authentication systems
Governance isn’t cloud-specific
• These problems also exist without cloud
• Two differences with clouds: – Instances come and go à need automation – Developers are in charge à need policies
CUSTOMER STORY
Customer Story (1)
• Instances use SSH Key management as built in to the cloud platform – One key, multiple instances
Customer Story (2)
• When someone needs a key to access infrastructure, they have to ask around for it – Infosec can’t get the keys when they “really”
need them – New employees lose time asking for keys – Email isn’t a secure key exchange
mechanism!
Customer Story (3)
• When an employee leaves the company, enterprise IT has no way to ensure their access is revoked
• Instead, they rely on firewalls and shutting down VPN access
LESSONS LEARNED
Authentication
• Invest in integrating your cloud and instances with a centralized revokable source of authentication – e.g. LDAP, Kerberos
• Don’t share SSH keys when you can avoid it – And certainly not Cloud keys!
Networking
• Ensure that developers aren’t allowed to launch insecure setups – Public IP + Open ports = Disaster
• Balance with the need to preserve developer productivity – Automate policy enforcement
PARTING WORDS
Recap (1)
• Cloud can get you: – Business agility – Cost effectiveness
Recap (2)
• You’ll find hurdles along the way: – Are your people ready to adopt cloud? – Do you have a strategy for cost management? – Do you have a strategy for governance?
Next steps (1)
• CloudStack is easy to get started with and production-ready. It’s a great choice – Our customer Samsung is using CloudStack
to power mobile app backends for millions of devices (smartphones, smart TVs…)
Next steps (2)
• Of course, come and talk to us if you think we can help you overcome those hurdles we talked about!
THANK YOU!
Sebastian Stadil — Founder of Scalr Scalr Cloud Management — www.scalr.com