PeopleSoft and The Cloud

PeopleSoft Conference 2011
Case Study: How using 'The Cloud' accelerated Pret's PeopleSoft project
Duncan Davies
CTO - Succeed
Page 1

Introduction
Who am I?
My name is Duncan Davies, I’m a long-time PeopleSoft techie with a passion for sharing information and building a knowledgeable community.
I blog at www.PeopleSoftTipster.com.
Who are Succeed?
Succeed are an established specialist PeopleSoft consultancy that specialises in full project lifecycle implementations of large HCM, CRM, Time and Attendance, Payroll, and Financials applications for large blue chip companies.
Over the last 11 years we’ve grown to around 60 people, two thirds of whom are permanent staff, and mostly having more than 5 years experience with PeopleSoft. Our teams are currently working across 10 different client sites.

Introduction
Who are Pret?
Pret a Manger are a privately owned British food retailer. Their unique selling point is:
“proper sandwiches avoiding the obscure chemicals, additives and preservatives common to so much of the 'prepared' and 'fast' food on the market today.”
They have just under 300 stores and are
growing by about 10%/year.
They are incredibly focused on staff
wellbeing and happiness.

The Challenge
A green-field PeopleSoft implementation of:
Core HR
Profile Management
Career Planning
Succession Planning
Recruitment
Health & Safety
Global Payroll
Absence Management
Disciplinary & Grievance
Training
Benefits
Against a backdrop of a company busily growing in lots of directions, and with an aggressive timeline.
In summary, a lot of modules, quickly.
We had to get up and running fast!

The Cloud – Terminology
There is a lot of confusing terminology thrown around when trying to find a infrastructure provider:
Hosting
Private Cloud
SaaS
Public Cloud
Multi-Tenancy
OnDemand

The Cloud – A Primer
In ‘The Cloud’ just means “outside of the
customer’s datacentre.”
The ‘Private Cloud’ is outsourcing management of your virtualised infrastructure to someone else, either on your premises or hosted in their proprietary data centre.
Vendors in this area are Rackspace, IBM’s Hosting, Oracle OnDemand.

The Private Cloud
It’s a good start, as:
You’re taking advantage of your provider’s lower hardware costs
You no longer have to worry about data-centre security, backups, redundancy etc.
Virtualising gives some flexibility
But:
This isn’t too different from the old Application Service Provider (ASP) model from the 90’s
You’ll still be paying fixed amounts (monthly, or annually) for fixed servers

The Public Cloud
The ‘Public Cloud’ is an open network using standard templates (eg. Amazon has 11 hardware templates).
‘Multi-tenancy’ is where several customers share a single instance of the application (examples are SAP ByDesign, NetSuite, Workday and maybe Fusion). This is difficult and/or not delivered with PeopleSoft and is not applicable for larger customers!
Full SaaS or Pure SaaS is a multi-tenant application running in a public cloud with accelerated feature delivery.

AWS - Public Cloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
A bigger step forward, as:
Much lower hardware costs (not just at server level, but data centre level too)
Far more flexibility (servers charged by the hour) Military grade security
Higher performance
Super fast provisioning
Global availability

Just how big are the clouds?
Amazon AWS has 5 regions:
US East (Northern Virginia),
US West (Northern California),
EU (Ireland),
Asia Pacific (Singapore),
Asia Pacific (Tokyo).
Within each region is at least 2 availability zones.
Within each zone is at least one Data Centre.
Oracle is also entering this market and currently has a Data Centre in the US – The Austin Data Center (ADC).

Huge infrastructure
“Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com’s global infrastructure through the company’s first 5 years, when it was a $2.76 billion annual revenue enterprise,”
AWS Engineer James Hamilton

Why Amazon AWS?
Cedexis Survey

Instance Sizes
Price includes Windows license.
Prices are for Windows instances in Ireland/EU data-centre using exchange rate as of 20th June 2011
Hourly prices are ‘on-demand’ instances.

Ease of Administration

Controlling Instances
How do I administer my instances?
Firefox add-in ‘ElasticFox’. Instances can also be managed from the AWS web site.

Creating Instances
Adding storage is just as easy.

Concerns

Concerns
Connectivity Speed
Insanely fast network connection
Reliability/Availability
SLA is 99.95% uptime – in reality it’s far better
Security
Firewalled by default
Control which IP Ranges have access
Virtual Private Cloud – site-to-site VPN
Military grade protection at Data Centres

Why use it
with PeopleSoft

Oracle Support for Amazon
Amazon and Oracle have announced that a wide selection of Oracle enterprise software has been certified to run on Amazon EC2.
Customers who power their business with Oracle software can fully leverage … Amazon Web Services for production workloads with full support from Oracle and AWS.
Oracle customers can use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.
A set of platform and application templates that customers can run as instances on Amazon are now available. These templates reduce implementation times from days to minutes.

Amazon at Pret

Amazon outage in April
There was an Amazon outage in April where the entire Virginia region went down for a day.
If this had happened in the EU zone our environments wouldn’t have been down (as we don’t use EBS).
If we were running Production on AWS we’d consider going multi-region.
The benefit of Amazon is this is a lot easier than if you owned the hardware yourself.

Use Cases
Cost Effective Hosting
Elastic Usage
Short-term development resources

Thank you
Thank you for your time.
I’m happy to answer questions, either now or around the venue later.
This presentation will be available from the Succeed and UKOUG Websites.

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PeopleSoft and The Cloud

by Duncan Davies on Jul 07, 2011

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PeopleSoft and The Cloud — Presentation Transcript