Ali Khajeh-Hosseini described his journey from starting a PhD in cloud computing research to founding PlanForCloud, a startup that helps users forecast cloud costs and optimize deployments. He explained how cloud computing works at a basic level, and discussed the many pricing models from providers like AWS. PlanForCloud aims to simplify this complexity for users by analyzing their workload and infrastructure requirements to generate cost forecasts and recommendations.

1. Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
@AliKhajeh, @PlanForCloud
March 2013, University of Edinburgh

2. Why am I here?
Describe our journey…
from research to startup

3. Jan 2009: Started PhD in St Andrews
May 2010: PlanForCloud v.1 ready
Feb 2011: Interned in California for 7 months
Dec 2011: Hassan quit his job and joined
Feb 2012: Launched PlanForCloud v.2
May 2012: Mountain View for YC interview

5. Why?
1. Perfect fit between products
2. Scotland is a great talent pool

6. PlanForCloud helps users make decisions
RightScale helps users do it

7. 1 st year: $450M of cloud-spend forecast

8. What the heck is…
a cloud?

9. Server

10. Rack

11. Container

12. 2500
Servers
Electricity, Water, Internet

15. a cloud

16. Around 60 Staff
30 Megawatts = Perth (Scotland)!
140 Containers
38,500 m2 = 4 ftbl pitches
360,000 Servers
500,000,000 Dollars
h"p://www.microso..com/Presspass/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/February2012/23-­‐02DublinDataCentre.mspx

17. Why cloud?
Cloud computing has many benefits
- Elasticity
- Pay-per-use pricing
...

18. Animoto’s crazy scale-out
Scale-out from 50 to 4,000 servers in 3 days
h"p://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/23/animoto-­‐facebook-­‐scale-­‐up/

19. Zynga’s Z-Cloud
Launch new games on public clouds
Move to private cloud when usage patterns are understood
h"p://www.rightscale.com/customers/zynga-­‐grows-­‐to-­‐1-­‐social-­‐gaming-­‐site-­‐with-­‐rightscale.php
h"p://code.zynga.com/2012/02/the-­‐evoluJon-­‐of-­‐zcloud/

20. There are many providers
and pricing models
We have over 10,000 prices

21. Example: a MySQL Database
AWS Relation Database Service (RDS)
- Up-front reservation fee (optional)
- CPU: $X/hour (based on instance type and cloud)
- Storage: $X/GB/month
- Transactions: $X/Millions of I/O ops
- Provisioned IOPS: $X/IOPS/month (has other limitations)
- Redundancy: double the CPU hourly rate
- Data transfer: $X/GB (tiered across cloud)

22. There are different purchase options
- On-Demand: fixed rate
- Reserved: pay upfront, lower rate
- Spot: Bid how much you would pay
- Discounts and consolidated bills

23. AWS Reserved Instances
up-front procurement to pay-per-use
You have to specify: term (1/3 yr), utilization, availability zone,
instance type and OS when buying a RI
Image
taken
from
h"p://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/reserved-­‐instance-­‐opJons-­‐for-­‐amazon-­‐ec2.html

24. AWS Reserved Instances Marketplace
Buy and sell reservations

25. AWS Spot Prices
Bid for an instance, it’ll get switched on if bid >= spot price.
You pay spot price, AWS sets it.
h"p://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ladypine/spotprice-­‐slides-­‐postmortem.pdf

26. Prices change
(feels like there’s a price war between providers)

27. What the heck?
I just wanted a simple database
PlanForCloud simplifies this

28. How much would it cost to deploy my systems on Cloud X?
Would it be cheaper if I use deployment option X or Y?
What happens to my costs if:
- my system grows?
- cloud provider changes prices?

29. IT managers Software Engs
Consultants Accountants
Users

30. How much would
Pinterest or TripAdvisor cost
to host on the cloud?
h"p://highscalability.com/blog/2012/11/1/cost-­‐analysis-­‐tripadvisor-­‐and-­‐pinterest-­‐costs-­‐on-­‐the-­‐aws-­‐clo.html

31. How much would it cost to deploy
System X on Cloud Y?
e.g. TripAdvisor’s 700K requests/min system
on the AWS US-East cloud

34. $1.7M/year

35. Would it be cheaper to use
deployment option X or Y?
e.g. reserved instances, different types of instances,
different cloud providers…

36. $0.9M/year
(using reserved instances)
1st month: $450K
After: $38K/month

37. What happens to costs
if system grows?
e.g. start with 410TB of S3 storage,
then grow by 25% every month

38. Currently: $39K/month
1yr from now: $470K/month

39. It’s starting to get interesting
1. Many clouds worldwide
2. Many pricing models
3. Markets for computing
4. RightScale helps move between clouds
Cost optimisation

40. 1st office: home
Then we moved
to the TechCube

43. RightScale