1. Scalability and Availability
with Cloud Computing
Mike Fisher
“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

2. Our Writing
 2 Published Books
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

3. Our Business
Over 250 Clients in 13 countries…and Growing
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

4. Cloud Computing
“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

5. Defining Cloud Computing
 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
 This is the most basic type of cloud service and offers servers (often as virtual
machines), networking, and storage as services.
 Examples of this include Amazon’s Web Services and Rackspace.
 Platform as a Service (PaaS)
 This cloud offering provides not only the hardware but a layer above, providing
platforms to run custom applications usually specific to certain programming
languages.
 Examples of these include Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s App Engine.
 Software as a Servie (SaaS)
 This service is an offering of a finished product hosted in a multi-tenant manner
(many customers on a single implementation).
 Examples of this include Gmail, Sales Force, Service-Now, New Relic, and many
more.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

6. Cloud Computing Trends
In a 2012 survey by North Bridge Venture Partners with 785 respondents1:
 3 drivers of cloud computing - scalability, cost, mobility
 Only 3% consider it to be too risky — down from 11% last year.
 Only 12% say the cloud platform is too immature — down from 26% a
year ago.
 50% of the survey respondents now say they have ―complete
confidence‖ in the cloud
 80% of respondents identify big data as the most likely sector to be
disrupted by cloud computing
 Eighty-four percent of all new software will be SaaS-based.
Cloud is simply becoming the way we do things.
1 http://www.northbridge.com/2012-cloud-computing-survey
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

7. SaaS
 Gartner predicts that SaaS will hit $14.5 billion in 2012, a 17.9%
growth from the previous year, with growth continuing through
2015 when it will be $22.1 billion.2
 This growth is being fueled by several factors including new
software design and delivery modules allowing for more instances of
an application to run simultaneously, bandwidth costs continuing to
drop, and customer frustration over the purchasing-implementation
cycle.
 According to CIOZone.com, a list of the top 60 fastest-growing
public software companies in 2007 was dominated by companies
switching from a proprietary license model to a subscription model.
The demand for SaaS offerings is growing rapidly.
2 http://www.startable.com/2012/04/09/saas-growth-still-going-strong-according-to-gartner/
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

8. Concerns with Using SaaS:
1. What if the service is unavailable? "Everything Fails―
2. Where is your data backed up?
3. What is the cost? Including data migration
4. What level of access?
5. Does it comply with industry regulations? PCI, PA-DSS
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

9. Concerns with Becoming SaaS
 How do you move to SaaS without creating an RFP
event for your customers?
 ―The IT organization of the customer is held
accountable for the solution regardless of on
premise or SaaS‖ – Susan Rossnick, VP Engineering,
Kronos
 Availability
 Scalability
 People and Process
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

10. Availability is a Feature
Availability IS NOT a metric.
• It is a FEATURE of your site.
• It is the table stakes to join the SaaS
game.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

11. Chasing a Rainbow
Scalability is a Journey, not a Destination:
• This is not a one time fee to play the game.
• Failure to continually invest is a guarantee
of failure.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

12. It Takes a Village
Technology is Not Enough. You need:
• The right people and the right org
structure..
• The right processes.
• Most importantly: The right MINDSET!
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

13. PaaS
 The demand for PaaS, at least among our clients, is not that
great.
 There are early indications that PaaS providers are starting
to offer services that are moving them more into the IaaS
market.
 If you’re interested in PaaS your choices are very limited
based on the technology stack that you are using. The real
question is whether you should go directly to an IaaS provider
or if you gain enough benefits from the PaaS provider to
makeup for the additional cost.
The demand for PaaS is NOT large.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

14. IaaS
 The spend on IaaS cloud computing is expected to
grow 48.7 percent in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from
$3.4 billion in 2011.3
 Some of our clients have 100% of their services
hosted on an IaaS provider while others are
completely in a collocation facility or datacenter.
 We are seeing more clients move towards a hybrid
model.
Own the base, rent the spike
3 http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-07/infrastructure/33082032_1_ito-market-bryan-britz-saas
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

15. Issues with IaaS
 Security
 Many IaaS providers are becoming PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant.
 Using their service doesn’t provide you with the compliance - you need to be
responsible for your own auditing.
 Passing audits is not cut and dry but rather a negotiation with the auditors and
therefore you need to be able to clearly articulate how you are following the
standards or guidelines while utilizing cloud computing.
 Cost
 The cost of IaaS is decreasing
 Most companies still find that if they run the servers (virtual machines) 24 hrs /
day the break even is around 18 months.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

16. Issues with IaaS Cont’d
 Inconsistent I/O
 There is a huge amount of variability with some IaaS storage.
 Some of our clients run Bonnie to test I/O prior to using the instance
and then periodically to ensure it hasn’t dropped drastically.
 You need to make sure your application can handle this variability or
create work-around to handle this issue.
 High failure rate
 The virtual machines of most IaaS seem to be less reliable than bare
metal.
 Netflix who moved to 100% IaaS came up with Chaos Monkey and Simian
Army to address this issue of less reliability.
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

17. Case Study
Overview
 Client X is changing the way information is navigated and
organized based on how people interact and relate to each
other.
 10B Monthly Page Views
 400M Unique Visitors
 916K Active Domains
 Tracking 170M Users
 1TB of Raw Log Data Each Day
 100% hosted on Amazon’s EC2
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

18. Case Study
~1M Publisher Sites
HBase used previously,
switched 9 months ago to
Content Analyzer Cassandra Cassandra due to
Cookie Users
250+M URLS
performance reasons.
Publisher Access
Rotated every 5 min
Raw Data
User Modeling S3 Mapping Membase
200+M Profiles 30M Cookies/day
Memcache used previously but needed persistence
Hadoop
Publisher Analytics Hive
MongoDB
AesterData originally used but performance was poor in EC2
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“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com

19. Scalability and Availability
with Cloud Computing
Questions?
“We wrote the book on scalability” www.akfpartners.com