Presentation given by our CEO Mike Kelly at this year's Excellence in Policing conference talking about the benefits of cloud computing and the Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy of outsourcing data. The presentation looks at the long term trends supporting the adoption of cloud technologies and dispels some of the myths and reasons why not to adopt cloud. The presentation concludes with an examination of the benefits of utilising cloud technology and examines how best to adopt a cloud approach.

1. The effectiveness, efficiency and
legitimacy of outsourcing your data
Dr Mike Kelly
Mike.Kelly@datacentred.co.uk
CEO DataCentred

2. WHY ARE THINGS SO DIFFERENT
NOW?

3. Historic Cost of RAM
• 1950 $4 per individual transistor
• 2014 $0.00000000125 per individual
transistor
• Equivalent to 3.2 billion times cheaper
• You would probably expect remarkable things
to be happening under these extraordinary
circumstances
• And they certainly are…

4. DOING MORE FOR LESS –
EFFECTIVENESS AND EFFICIENCY

5. Long Term Trends Supporting Cloud Approach
• Open Systems and Open Source
• Declining cost of kit
• Maturity of tools
• Density of applications
• Different style systems integration
• Different and radically more efficient styles of
development
• Cloud and Open Source is the Internet’s style
of development

6. REASONS GIVEN FOR NOT USING
CLOUD

7. Reasons NOT to use cloud 1
• Fear
– Can be weird, but ponytails know things suits don’t
know about systems building
• Security
– virtual networks, strong separation, multiple levels of
virtualisation, encryption end to end,
– always a dilemma between access, usefulness and
security
– Not all data can go on a public cloud, all data can
probably go on a private cloud, need to decide case by
case
– Isolated data is safe (and useless)

8. Reasons NOT to use cloud 2
• Reliability
– Cloud architectures mirror highly reliable systems,
and commodity architecture failure rates very low
• Availability
– The most available systems (Google, Amazon,
Azure) are private clouds
– Individual cloud building blocks can fail, but whole
cloud cannot
– Open Cloud means portability between cloud and
use of multiple clouds

9. Total cost of ownership
• Argument is that somehow supported
commodity systems on enterprise hardware
prove cheaper in the long run
• Eh?
• Lose licensing costs for much software
• Easily reconfigured/developed
• Commodity hw
• (importance of partnerships, different style
of development – one that works)

10. Applications - Lose the Lock in
• Open Source and Open Cloud maximise
supplier and application independence
• Move from Cloud to Cloud, and know it will
work
• Standard interfaces throughout
• Thin layer of particular applications on top
• Revision and development assumed

11. REASONS FOR USING CLOUD AND
HOW TO USE IT

12. Open Source and Open Cloud: Re-Use

13. Open Source and Open Cloud: Re-Use
(Effectivenes and Efficiency)
• Open Source and Open Systems allows us to
build and rebuild
• Don’t throw it away and start again for every
new development
• Build on systems that are working and will
carry on working
• Needs an awarenes of Open Source landscape
and ecosystems

14. Towns, Cities and Regions which are ‘Open’
• Schoten
– Only Open Source throughout, including phone
systems
• Munich
– Peter Hofmann, CIO
– 2002-2012, de-MicroSofted City
• Swedish Association of Local Government
– Joint ownership of all development
– All open source based, though they don’t quite
reciprocate
• Partnerships versus Applications and Solutions

15. Cloud Approach - Agile Teams

16. Different styles of development for Cloud
(Effectiveness and Efficiency)
• Procurement is different
– need good partners and partnerships
– Retain or share your IP in systems
• Apps versus applications
• Agile versus waterfall
• Agile development partnerships with
reconfigurable and reusable systems
• Fail quickly if the development must fail

17. What Cloud is and isn’t
• Think people don’t quite see the difference
between cloud, virtualisation and just heaps
of resources
• Cloud is obviously heaps of virtualised and
virtualisable resources
• But it’s how those resources are organised and
can be used
• But also important that it’s an Open Cloud
– Applications can migrate between Open Clouds

18. What’s really important
• But actually if you’re a cloud builder, and even
if you’re a user, cloud is the cloud toolset
• Powerful tools are what has changed, tools
lets us remember how we built things and lets
us automate the building
• And if we can automate the automation (and
we can), then we build huge power with each
turn of the screw

19. Why cloud matters now
• Allows builder and user to deploy any virtual
configuration
• Any estate can be virtualised to any degree
and level
• Cloud allows those next level virtualisations
• Any estate and its complete combination of
data and programme config can be written
down for the toolset to generate once or any
number of times, anywhere, on any target

20. What is Our Cloud?
• It’s an infrastructure cloud
– Commodity hw
– Open Source sw
• Compute based on OpenStack
– Original development between NASA and Rackspace
– Specifically to be an Open Cloud
– Uses commodity compute boards
– Amazon EC2 compatible interface
– vSphere like controls
– More configurable

21. What is Our Cloud
• Storage Cloud
– CEPH, California based development
– Uses commodity SATA discs
– S3 compatible interface
• Is high performance/high throughput
– Because so many nodes
– Specialist data warehouse appliances will be
quicker
– But 10x price (or more)

22. Why These Choices
• Very large scale Open Source project
– it will continue to be developed
– Mainstream
• Low cost base
– Reduced licensing costs for base sw
– Can use ‘any’ hw
• Incredibly powerful tools
– We improve and automate

23. What Cloud and Open Source Show Us
• The key is not the kit, probably not even the
software is most important
• It’s the partnerships you build which can produce
solutions
– get reconfigured
– then produce a revised solution, again and again
– And reconfigurable partnerships
• That’s how world wide Open Source projects
work
• Very loose self managed projects outperform
traditional projects by a mile

24. Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy
• Effectiveness, better systems, available,
usable, reconfigurable
• Efficiency, direct cost savings, time savings
• Legitimacy, it’s a responsibility for anyone
involved in procurement, public or private to
start to engage with one of the quietest, most
remarkable revolutions, it draws its legitimacy
from its own results.