Andy Parsons gave a workshop on understanding and scaling the cloud for startups. He began by defining cloud computing and discussing its impact on startups. He then covered the essential aspects of cloud computing like self-service provisioning, pooled resources, and metered billing. Parsons also discussed the different service and deployment models, components of AWS, and how the cloud infrastructure works using virtualization. He ended by providing recommendations for how development teams should architect applications for the cloud and factors to consider when choosing a cloud provider.

1. Head in the Cloud
Understanding and Scaling the Cloud
for Startups
Managing Technology Teams Workshop
Andy Parsons | @andyparsons | andyparsons@gmail.com

2. Today We Will Cover
What is “The Cloud?”
How Does It Work?
How Well Does It Work?
What Your Dev Team Should Know
How Much Does It Cost?
Which Provider To Use? *
If Time: Hands On Demo

3. What Is “The Cloud?”

4. “Cloud Computing is the delivery of
computing as a service rather than a
product, whereby shared resources,
software, and information are provided to
computers and other devices as a utility (like
the electricity grid) over a network.”
(http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf)

5. Impact to Startups
Changed Economics
Democratizes Entrepreneurship
Changed VC landscape:
Then: raise $$ to build something
Now: build something to raise $$

6. Essential Aspects and Some Jargon
Self Service On-Demand
Provisioning without humans
No ownership of servers
Pooled Resources
Multi-tenant
Location independence
Processing, Memory, Storage, Bandwidth, Services
Rapid Elasticity - provision and destroy
Measured & Metered Service
Usage transparency
Cost transparency * (kinda)

7. Service Models
SaaS = Software As A Service
this is Google Apps. Enough said.
PaaS = Platform As A Service
Drop code, watch magic
IaaS = Infrastructure As A Service
Building blocks only

8. Deployment Models
Private Cloud
Tenants are a single customer
Owned or rented
On premises or off
Public Cloud
Off premises
Available to anyone
Hybrid Cloud
2 or more cloud infrastructure providers bound together
OR, hybrid multi-tenant and dedicated resources

9. PaaS vs IaaS
IaaS PaaS
Application Code You You
Runtime Platform You Provided
Security You Provided
Databases You Provided
Servers Provided Provided
Virtualization Provided Provided
Hardware Provided Provided
Storage Provided Provided
Networking Provided Provided

10. Where is the Cloud Essential?
Some examples:
Web servers: scaling up and down to meet
demand
Offline data crunching
Recommendation engines
Social Graph applications
Giant search indexing

11. AWS Components
EC2 - computing
EBS - fast-ish storage
S3 - storage capacity
ElastiCache
ELB - load balancing
CloudFront - Content Delivery Network on top of S3
Route53 - DNS
SNS - notification service
SES - email services
SQS - queueing
Elastic MapReduce - Hadoop
Databases
Simple DB
RDS
DynamoDB
CloudFormation - templated stacks

12. Cloud Timeline
First General
Hypervisor: use Google
Dot com FedRAMP,
Runs on Internet docs and Multi-cloud,
bubble Microsoft US Gov
IBM 360 becomes EC2 commoditization,
bursts Azure Cloud
common launch market growth
1961 1965 1969 1990 1995 2000 2002 2006 2008 2009 2010 2012
John IBM and Oracle
Intel AZN AWS
McCarthy - Google and other
founded, founded launches
Cloud introduce clouds,
ARPANet
Computing their IaaS popularity
created
Concept of PaaS

13. How Does It Work?

14. Virtualization
Hides physical details of hardware
Lots of VMs run on a single physical
machine
VM’s are relocatable

15. Virtualization
Software or “Full” Virtualization: software-only, can
virtualize any hardware and unmodified OS
Hardware-Assisted: Special capabilities built into
processors to assist with running virtual hosts
Paravirtualization
uses a special “hypervisor” to expose an API to
virtual OS
Parallels, VMWare

16. Massive Scale
Affordability comes from economies of
scale
Fault tolerance and soft failing of hardware
Automated failover
Providers have developed proprietary
monitoring, networking, and in some cases
virtualization

17. How Well Does It Work?

18. Really Well! Until Things Break.
Failure of some kind is assured
Performance Drops
Instance Failures
Network Outages
EBS RAID bottlenecks

19. One day this email came in...
Hello,
One of your instances in the us-east-1 region is on hardware that requires network
related maintenance. Your other instances that are not listed here will not be affected.
i-3fcdb156
For the above instance, we recommend migrating to a replacement instance to avoid
any downtime. Your replacement instance would not be subject to this maintenance.
If you leave your instance running, you will lose network connectivity for up to two
hours. The maintenance will occur during a 12-hour window starting at 12:00am
PST on Monday, February 15, 2010. After the maintenance is complete, network
connectivity will be restored to your instance.
As always, we recommend keeping current backups of data stored on your instance.
Sincerely,
The Amazon EC2 Team

20. ~ April 21, 2011 ~

21. ~ April 21, 2011 ~
MASSIVE AWS Service outage
Some data loss (< 0.1%)
Revealed details about how EBS worked at
the time
Catastrophic for some
Triggered by a router upgrade!
Replication stampede

22. Disk I/O: The Thorn in Your Side
Unpredictable
No guarantees
Bane of Databases
And disk-bound operations like app startup
Monitor closely
Build Around This (coming up)

23. EBS Filesystem Tests
Seq. Reads Seq. Writes Random Random R/W Mix: RW Mix:
Filesystem # of Disks
(MB/s) (MB/s) Reads (MB/s) Writes (MB/s) Reads (MB/s) Writes (MB/s)
EXT3,
3 74.7 102.1 1.3 20.4 21.3 25.1
64K stripe
EXT3, 128K stripe,
3 1.6 11.3
2MB readahead buffer
XFS,
3 20.7 107.2 1.7 40.2 13.6 12.5
64k stripe
XFS,
3 102.2 106.2 1.5 87.8 41.1 24.6
128K stripe
XFS,
4 115.8 135.4 2.0 76.4 41.0 24.6
64K stripe
XFS,
4 104.8 103.1 1.8 70.8 49.3 30.3
128K stripe
XFS, 128K stripe,
4 105.0 102.8 2.0 70.1 55.1 31.5
deadline scheduler

24. How Will Things Improve?
Price drops
SSD (already in AWS DynamoDB)
Improvements in virtualization
Ever more interesting PaaS offerings
Convergence of IaaS and PaaS

25. What Your Dev Team
Should Know

26. We Don’t Need a Sys Admin!
You probably do, actually. But not yet.
Ops -> DevOps -> NoOps
(Adrian Cockroft, NetFlix)
But your SA or DevOps can do more than
ever before.
David Fletcher http://cloudtweaks.com

27. Architecting for the Cloud
No SPFs
No SLAs
Don’t depend on SLA

28. Architecting for the Cloud
Figure out how things will fail. Design for
failure.
No fire drills. Deal with Friday failures on
Monday.
Make provisioning new parts trivial
Failover
Database Replication

29. Architecting for the Cloud
Exact hardware location is decided by the
provider
Design to Distribute
Stateless wherever possible
Loosely coupled, redundant systems
Redundant data storage
Understand Your Dependencies!

30. Tools: Monitoring/Cost Management
Ylastic
RightScale
Cloudability
CloudVertical
SensibleCloud
Raveld
Cloud Cruiser

31. How Much Does It Cost?

32. But wait a sec...
Cloud Hardware
100% Considers cost
of:
Utilization
✓Computing,
✓Storage,
80%
✓Bandwidth,
✓Staff
60%
$0K $150K $300K $450K $600K
Cumulative Cost Over 3 Years
(http://www.hightechinthehub.com/2011/09/dirty-little-secret-of-the-cloud/)

33. But wait a sec...
YEAR PHYSICAL CLOUD
1 $240,000 $196,000
2 $62,000 $196,000
3 $62,000 $196,000
TOTAL $364,000 $588,000
(http://www.hightechinthehub.com/2011/09/dirty-little-secret-of-the-cloud/)

34. Elasticity is the key
YEAR PHYSICAL CLOUD
1 $240,000 $80,000
2 $62,000 $100,000
3 $62,000 $120,000
TOTAL $364,000 $400,000
Now we are managing costs

35. Price Comparisons
The Devil is in the Details
Billing is a Means of Differentiation
What are you paying for?
“Compute Units” + RAM
Bandwidth
Storage
Virtualization (efficient use of metal)

36. Price Comparisons
Example: Instance Types
AWS Rackspace Joyent Softlayer
Cores 1 1 1 1
RAM 1.7 GB 1 GB 1 GB 1 GB
Disk 160 GB 40 GB 30 GB 25 GB
$/month $58 $44 $62 $50
But what’s a “core?”

37. EC2 Reserved Pricing
3-Year Run Cost:
35 small, 10 large instances
Own Hardware On-Demand 1-Year Reserved 3-Year Reserved
Usage $157,680 $75,411 $48,123
Hardware $20,129
Network gear $4,026
Hardware Maint. $28,986
Datacenter Cost $131,382
Remote Hands $1,014
Data Transfer $10,071 $6138 $6138 $6138
TOTAL $195,608 $163,818 $81,550 $54,263
(http://mikekhristo.com/ec2-ondemand-vs-reserved-instance-savings-calculator/)

38. Keys to Controlling Costs
Correlate Cloud sizing with application needs
Keep things running at close to 100% utilization
Fact: for always-on infrastructure cloud is more
expensive than hardware
Good metrics to consider:
CCOGS Cloud cost of goods sold = Cloud Costs/
Revenue
% Utilization: Actual Utilization/Total Capacity
HOLY GRAIL: Cloud Costs/Active User

39. Which Provider to Use?
David Fletcher http://cloudtweaks.com

40. Guess What? It depends.

41. How Do Providers Distinguish Themselves?
Affinity for a language or stack
Pricing models
Performance
Add-on computing services (DNS, Load
Balancing ...)
Managed Services (backup, humans ...)
SLAs

42. Hands On
(If there’s time)

43. Thanks!
Andy Parsons | @andyparsons | andyparsons@gmail.com