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Pets vs. Cattle:!
The Elastic Cloud Story
!
DevOps Chicago Meetup!
February 26, 2014
@randybias

A Tale of Two Clouds
2

Enterprise Computing Approach
3
GUI Driven!
Ticket-Based!
Hand-Crafted!
Reserved !
Scale-up!
Smart Hardware!
Proprietary!
Traditional Dev!
…

Cloud Computing Approach
4
API Driven!
Self-Service!
Automated!
On-demand!
Scale-out!
Smart Apps!
Open Source!
Agile DevOps!
…

Elastic Cloud Shifts Uptime Responsibility
5
Enterprise Model Cloud Model
99.9%!
Applications!
(8h46m down)
99.999%!
Infrastructure!
($$$$)
99.999%
Applications!
(5m down)
99%
Infrastructure!
($$)

Elastic Cloud Origins
6
Elastic !
Private Cloud
Enterprise Virtualization!
Private Cloud
Elastic &
Virtualization
2.0 Clouds are
very different.!
!
Different
workloads.!
!
Different !
architectures.!
!
Different !
skills.!
!
Different
economics.
≠
Virtual Infrastructure
Standardization, Automation,!
Chargeback, Self-Service!
Designed for Server Consolidation !
IT Admins manage Infrastructure!
Ticket-based manual provisioning!
Improves virtualization value
=
+
Elastic Public Cloud
On-premise
Deployment!
Designed for Agility!
Cloud Admins manage Services!
Self-service automated provisioning!
Delivers cloud value on-premise
=
+

What Companies Care About?
7
Cloud
Computing!
Agile
Development!
Business !
Agility!
Operational
Discipline!
ACCELERATING!
TIME TO VALUE!
Continuous
Integration
Continuous
Testing &
Delivery
Agile
Methodologies
IaaS / PaaS
!
!
Public / Private /
Hybrid
!
!
Big Data /
Analytics
!
!
Public APIs
Continuous
Deployment
DevOps Data Center &
App Automation
Line of
Business
Enablement
New App
Initiatives
(Mobile, SaaS,
etc.)
Data Center
Modernization

Elastic Cloud is a Mindset Change
8
Attribution: Bill Baker, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft
bowzer.company.com!
(scale-up)
web001.company.com!
(scale-out)
(Virtual) Servers *are* cattle

Pets vs. Cattle Takes Off
9
Microsoft
Cloudscaling
CERN
IBM
ScalrRackspace
Red Hat
Scale-out, not UP in Cloud

(Some) Elastic Cloud Patterns
!
!
!
What follows are *some* Elastic Cloud Patterns!
There are many more, but these are mine!
Input, ideas, & other thoughts welcome via twitter / email
10

Big Failure Domains !
Make Big Craters
11

Big Failure Domains !
Make Big Craters
12
Anti-Pattern
Anti-Pattern

Smaller Failure Domains
13
Would you rather have the whole cloud down !
or just a small bit of it for a short time?
vs

Loose Coupling
14
Synchronous, blocking
calls mean cascading
failures.
Async, non-block calls
mean failure in
isolation.

Open Source Software
15
Excessive software
taxation is the past.
Black boxes
create lock-in.
You can !
always fork.

Uptime in Software Self-management
16
Hardware fails.!
Software fails.!
People fail.
Only software can
measure itself &
respond to failure in
near real-time.
Applications designed
for 99.999% uptime can
run anywhere

Scale Out vs Scale up
17
Vertical Scaling
Make boxes bigger
(usually an HA pair)
Horizontal Scaling
Make more boxes
A
A
➔
➔
B
B ...A B C N

Circuit Breaker Pattern
18
Fallback mechanisms (e.g.
cached data)
ensure uninterrupted service
while giving service time to
recover
When failing service
detected, stop calling that
API and serve fallback
responses

Buy from ODMs
19
ODMs operate their
businesses on 3-10%
margins.
AMZN, GOOG, and
Facebook buy direct
without a middleman.
Only a few enterprise
vendors are pivoting to
compete.

Less Enterprise “Value” in x86 Servers
20
Generic servers rule. Full
stop. Nothing is better
because nothing else is
*generic*.
“... a data center full of vanity free servers
... more efficient ... less expensive to build
and run ... “ - OCP

Fully Routed (L3) Networking
21
The largest cloud operators
all run layer-3 routed,
networks with no VLANs.
Cloud-ready apps don’t
need or want VLANs.
Enterprise apps can be
supported on elastic clouds
using Software-defined
Networking (SDN)

Software-defined Networking (SDN)
22
• x86 server is the new Linecard"
• network switch is the new ASIC"
• VXLAN (or NVGRE) is the new Chassis"
• SDN Controller is the new SUP Engine
“Network Virtualization”

Flat Networking + SDNs
23
Flat + SDN co-exist
& thrive together
Standard
Security
Group
1 2
Availability
Zone
VM VM
VM
VM
VM
VM
Virtual L2 Network
VM
VMVM
Virtual Private
Cloud
Networking
VPC
Security
Group
Internet
VPC
Gateway
Physical
Node

RAIS instead of HA Pairs/Clusters
Redundant arrays of inexpensive services (RAIS)!
Load balanced with no state sharing!
Active … active … active … active … !
On failure, connections are lost, but failures are rare!
Rolling upgrades are easier, because each server is an island!
Think: scale-out + fault isolation (sharding)!
Ridiculously simple & scalable!
Hardware failures are infrequent & impact subset of traffic!
(N-F)/N, where N = total, F = failed!
10 RAIS servers - 1 failure == 90% capacity!
Most things retry anyway!
Cascade failures are unlikely and failure domains are small
24

Service Array (RAIS) Example
25
Backbone Routers
Cloud Access Switches
AZ (Spine) Switches
RAIS (NAT, LB, VPN)
OSPF Route Announcements
Return Traffic (default or source
NAT)
API
Public IP
Blocks
Cloud
Control
Plane

Lots of Inexpensive 1RU Switches
26
1RU: 6K-30K VMs / AZ
Simple spine-and-leaf flat routed network
Rack 1 Rack 2 Rack 3
Modular: 40K-200K VMs / AZ
Rack 1
Rack 2
Multiple
Racks
Rack 1
Rack 2
Multiple
Racks
Rack 1
Rack 2
Multiple
Racks

Direct-attached Storage (DAS)
27
Cloud-ready apps
manage their own
data replication.
DAS is the smallest failure
domain possible with
reasonable storage I/O.
SAN == massive failure
domain.
SSDs will be the great
equalizer.

Elastic Block Device Services
28
EBS/EBD is a crutch
Bigger failure domains
(AWS outage anyone?), complex,
sets high expectations
Sometimes you need a crutch.
When you do, overbuild the network, and make sure
you have a smart scheduler.
AWS EBS Outage!
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

More Servers == More Storage I/O
29
>1M writes/second, triple-
redundancy w/ Cassandra on AWS
Linear scale-out == linear costs for performance

Hypervisors are a Commodity
30
Cloud end-users want OS
of choice, not HVs.
Level up! Managing iron is for
mainframe operators."
… hypervisors are bare metal APIs
Hypervisor of the future is open
source, easily modifiable, &
extensible.

The Hypervisor of the Future
May Be NO Hypervisor
31
LXC
ironic
Bare Metal Cloud

Quiz Time
32

Quiz Time
33
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding?

Quiz Time
34
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding ➔

Quiz Time
35
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing a Server
at a Time?

Quiz Time
36
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing a Server
at a Time ➔

Quiz Time
37
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling?

Quiz Time
38
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling➔

Quiz Time
39
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure?

Quiz Time
40
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure➔

Quiz Time
41
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals?

Quiz Time
42
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals ➔

Quiz Time
43
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy?

Quiz Time
44
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy ➔

Quiz Time
45
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy
Shared Nothing
Architecture?

Quiz Time
46
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy
Shared Nothing
Architecture➔

Quiz Time
47
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy
Shared Nothing
Architecture
Persistent Block Storage?

Quiz Time
48
Pets Cattle
NIC bonding
Managing Server at a
Time
Auto-scaling
Design-for-Failure
100% Uptime Goals
HA pairs for redundancy
Shared Nothing
Architecture
Persistent Block Storage
➔

Q & A
49
Randy Bias!
Founder & CEO, Cloudscaling!
Director, OpenStack Foundation!
@randybias