Introduction to Cloud Computing - TieConMidwest 2009

1. Get Your Head in the Cloud
Steven Robert
Chief Information Officer
Billhighway.com
Twitter.com/stevenRobert

2. About Me
Steven Robert | CIO – Billhighway.com
Husband, Dad, Entrepreneur, Optimist, Problem-Solver,
Passionate Technologist, Information Junkie & Life Hacker.
• Billhighway is…
– “Quick Books for Communities”
• > 250,000 members in 50 States & Canada
• Process > $1M in dues, fees & donations per day
• > $2 billion in transactions processed to date

3. “Hell, there are no rules here,
we’re trying to accomplish something”
~ Thomas Edison

4. Define: Cloud Computing
• Platform or “service” accessed over a network to
provide advanced, often transparent functionality
for mass consumption and high-availability.
• Seasonal or as-needed utilization
is a classic use case.
• Evolutionary:
ASP -> SaaS/PaaS -> Cloud

5. Generally Accepted Characteristics
• Self-Service
• Delivered over the network
• Elastic scalability
(grow as big as you need, pay as you go...)
* Think of it as renting IT resources vs. buying.

6. Cloud -> Business Translation
• Consider the cloud a technical utility.
• Understand your risk tolerance and current
business stage to establish a threshold for use.
• Stages of a business:
• Stage 1: Incubator (Speed to Market)
• Stage 2: Growth (Competitive Differentiation)
• Stage 3: Expansion (Core Competency)
• Stage 4: Maturity (R&D)
• Stage 5: Declining Conditions (Defense)

7. Technical Flavors
• Infrastructure Platforms
• Application Development Platforms
• Business App Platforms
• Special App Platforms:

8. Who are the Providers?

9. Early Adopters
1. Zillow – Amazon EC2
2. Intuit – Amazon S3
3. Animoto – Amazon EC2
– Released Facebook App: users were able to
render photos into MTV like videos
• Ramped from 25,000 users to 250,000 users in 3 days
• Signed up 20,000 new user per hour at peak
• Went from 50 to 3,500 servers in 5 days
• Two weeks later scaled back to 100 servers

10. Sounds Great – Right?
• A few things to think about…
– Downtime: Gmail / Postini – “Going Google”
– Reliability: Twitter API 
– Product Maturity
– Security
– Backups

11. Do Your Homework!
• PRO’s • CON’s
– Reduced costs – Compliance/Regulation
laws mandate on-site
– Resource sharing is
ownership of data
more efficient
– Security & Privacy
– Management moves
– Latency & Bandwidth
to cloud provider
guarantees
– Consumption based – Absence of robust SLAs
cost
– Portability & lock-in
– Speed to market – Availability & reliability
– Dynamic allocation

12. Opportunities
• Mashups!
– Consume third party APIs
• Existing Market Places:
– Open Social / Google Wave
– iPhone / App Store
– Facebook
– Salesforce.com

13. Thanks!
Email: srobert@billhighway.com
Twitter: @stevenRobert
Blog: stevenRobert.wordpress.com