The document discusses the complexities and challenges of cloud hosting for eportfolios, highlighting both the fears and potential benefits. It emphasizes the need for organizations to adapt their infrastructure, consider different providers, and address data privacy concerns, especially regarding EU regulations. Ultimately, while cloud hosting offers flexibility and reduced hardware management, it requires skilled personnel and comes with its own set of challenges.

1. Cloud hosting your ePortfolio
Presented by Catalyst IT

2. THE HYPE
➔
Burn all your IT equipment
➔
Let go your IT staf
➔
Save money
➔
Increase flexibility

3. THE FEAR
●
Slow
●
Complex
●
Privacy concerns
●
Losing control
●
Expensive

4. The reality is somewhere in between
●
Need to adapt to a diferent way of doing things
●
The complexity has moved
– Further abstracted from the real world
●
Costs need to be watched
– (Don't forget that double XL instance you left running)
– (And that 20TB of disk)
●
Diversity and resilience in deployment
– It's gonna break in a odd way, plan for it in a way that
will suit your organisation

5. Adapting
●
It's not going to be easy if you try to transpose your
existing infrastructure to cloud hosting. Consider what is
on ofer:
– Load balancers
– Databases
– Network Security
– Backups

6. The Providers (Examples)
●
Amazon
– Widest, but also most complex ofering
●
Microsoft Azure
– Was once geared towards Windows
●
Rackspace
– Morphing from one type of provider to another
●
Google
– Thanks for the price war
●
Catalyst and other OpenStack providers
– Obviously the best

7. Hedonistic IT
●
“Pets” vs “Cattle”
●
Live for today! For we shall die at 7PM!
– Infrastructure wasted 50% of the time
– Maybe you have no idea of the popularity?
– Scale down between semesters
●
Diversity and resilience in deployment
●
Maybe now you can scale horizontally
– One Mahara per dept/school?
●
Maybe Mahara institutions don't cut it
– New opportunities for on-billing

8. 1st
Corny Section Break Slide
A Higgs Boson walks into a
church, the priest says
“Sorry, we don't allow
bosons in here”

9. THE DANGER - It's real
●
Cloud hosting is terrifying
●
Can't see internals
– Powerlessness when it stops working (And why?!)
●
Unexpected new challenges
– Rate limiting on all sorts of annoying things
●
Disk access (Ie. Per operation)
●
Network throughput / New connections
●
CPU usage (Watch the %steal)
●
Instance start rates
●
Email sending rate

10. Safe Harbour - Schrems Vs. Facebook
●
US government and companies have access to data in a
way considered unlawful in the EU
– So storing data concerning European citizens in the
US probably illegal
– We all knew it was unsafe, now a court says so
– Probably the lowest risk is use a provider in your
country
– No legal compulsion for correction or erasure in the
USA
– NSA etc able to legally creep on your data in the USA

11. THE DANGER – Continues!
●
It's still shared hosting, and the performance can be
variable
– You are efected by your neighbors; further increasing
your powerlessness
●
Burnt by crappy VPS providers in the past
●
SLAs are pretty open ended, the most you are going to
get back is the money you are putting in

12. THE DANGER – … never ends!
●
To the big guys, you are probably a minnow
– Expect to get treated as such
– (But I bet all are looking for a coup in the education
market)
●
Skill loss
– How networks/firewalls actually work
– Install a database
– Manage storage
●
Scare people
– “We've moved it too the cloud”

13. 2nd
Corny Section Break
The Boson replies, “but without
me, you cannot have mass!”

14. THE GOOD PARTS – Begin!
●
Free your valuable system administrators to administer
– Save time dealing with hardware vendors
●
Impossible diagnostic tools
– Frequently Redhat (Or worse, Windows) only
●
Impossible staf at $HARDWARE_VENDOR
– Upgrade the BIOS/IMM/$RANDOM_FIRMWARE
– “Not running Windows/RedHat? We can't help..”
●
Expensive maintenance contracts
– They seldom show up within the agreed time anyway,
and make a weasely excuse (See above)
– And you probably feel like you never use it

15. THE GOOD PARTS – Continue
●
Not wasting time / having 0 lead time on hardware frees
you to
– Try new things
– Do and practise upgrades
– Load testing
●
Not having own hosting means
– No need for proximity to hardware (Sysadmins can
stay at home and not engage in hygiene!)
– Swap CapEx for OpEx
– The vendors are serious about hosting, maybe you
have trouble convincing others to be serious?

17. THE GOOD PARTS – ad nauseam
●
Invest time in resiliency, not redundancy
●
Save the planet (Maybe)
– Cloud providers do more with every watt than you
can do
●
No more room of that junk because 'maybe we need it'
●
Impress people
– “We've moved it to the cloud!”
●
Performance now very good, definitely good enough for
ePortfolios

18. More good bits
●
Much of choice in providers
●
Freedom to go to another
– Don't have justify investment in hardware
●
Maybe go 'half-way' and use a containerisation provider?
– Maybe talk to me about Docker

19. No one actually
works like this

20. IN SUMMARY
●
Generally suited to Mahara
– Load balancers
– Cloud DB
– Scale up for busy times
– Huge increase in flexibility
●
Except damn NFS!
●
Cloud hosting is not for everyone
– You still need skilled people to make it work for you
●
It's not the same as outsourcing your Mahara
– Some new challenges to replace old ones