5 quick wins for the cloud

5 Quick Wins for the Cloud

September 8, 2011

Watch the video of this webinar

http://www.rightscale.com/info_center/webinars/getting-started-series-5-quick-wins-for-the-cloud.php

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Cloud Management Platform

Your Panel TodayPresenting• Brian Adler, Professional Services Architect, RightScale • Rafael H. Saavedra, VP Engineering, RightScale

Q&A • Will Eschen, Account Manager, RightScale

Please use the “Questions” window to ask questions any time!

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Agenda• Quick Win #1 – Development & Test• Quick Win #2 – Configuration Automation• Quick Win #3 – Monitoring and Alerting• Quick Win #4 – Auto-Scaling Architectures• Quick Win #5 – High-Availability Architectures• Takeaways• Questions & Answers

Please use the “Questions” window to ask questions any time!


Quick Win #1

Development & Test

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Market Forces• Shorter release cycles• More agile, streamlined product development• Geographically distributed workforces• Need for simple deployment mechanisms

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Lifecycle Challenges

• Limited, shared resources

• Lead time for procuring and provisioning equipment

• Maintaining consistent environments throughout the lifecycle

• Maintaining multiple environments in parallel

• Distributed teams and team members

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• Dev & Test a top choice to move to the cloud• Provides IT and business agility• Highly scalable resources required for test

• 30% to 50% of all servers dedicated to test

• Most test servers run at less than 10% utilization

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

Other

Backup & Recovery

Test & Dev

Transaction Processing

Business Intelligence

Grid Computing

Mobile Services

Scalable Web Site

Today

Next Year

Why Cloud?

Source: RightScale Customer Survey

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Development and Test in a RightScale Managed Cloud

More creativityImproved qualityLess reworkFaster time to customerHigher utilization

Available Resources

Provisioning and Configuration Control

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Available, Easily Provisioned Dev & Test Resources


Quick Win #2

Configuration Automation

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Cloud Management Platform11

• Launch entire deployments• Launch new servers

“in context”• Monitor and respond to

deployment-wide events• Perform deployment-wide

maintenance• Easily clone entire

deployments for test & dev or new customers

Manage Systems, not Servers Improve productivity and create business agility


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Images vs. RightScale ServerTemplates

• Big & opaque• Complex to reproduce• Static• Not cloud-portable

Slow workflow Not cloud-agile

• Modular & flexible• Reproducible & maintainable• Dynamic & agile• w/ MCI - Multi-cloud enabled

Dev-like workflow Dynamic configuration

Virtual Machine Images RightScale ServerTemplates

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• Modular and variable-based• Built with re-usable scripts• ServerTemplates and scripts are

version controlled• Deployments* can be archived

* Logical groupings of servers.

RightScale’s ServerTemplate Methodology

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LAMP ServerTemplate Example


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Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!

• Find what you need• Browse examples• Use Diff • Partners!

Use the marketplace.

Advanced Search:Search by title AND description. Search by cloud. Search by category.

Tip!


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To Create, Record the Steps You Take

• Copy successful commands to new RightScripts.

• Extract variable information.• Attach needed files, or

compilations as archives.

Work on the instance.

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Consistent, Reusable Configurations

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Consistent, Reusable Configurations


Quick Win #3

Monitoring & Alerting

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Server Monitoring• RightScale monitors over 80 default real-time metrics for compute,

database, networking and load balancing on Linux and Windows.• Default metrics include:

• Servers: CPU (10), Disk (6), Memory (9), Network (3), System (1)• Applications: Processes (6)• Web Servers: Apache (15), IIS (5)• Databases: MySQL (21), SQL Server (16)

• Users can create custom monitoring plug-ins for user-defined metrics and view graphs of these metrics on the RightScale dashboard.

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Cluster Monitoring• Individual graphs

• Good for a dozen servers• Displays all standard graphs with full detail

• Stacked graphs• Displays the contribution of many servers to a total• Great to see the sum and variability of activity in a cluster• Difficult to make out individual servers• Examples: requests/sec, cpu busy cycles, I/O bytes/sec

• Heat maps• Displays a bar for each server• Great to see uneven distribution across servers• Great to quickly spot performance problems across many servers• Difficult to read absolute values or see the total cluster activity

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Cluster Monitoring• Cluster monitoring: one graph per server

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Stacked Graphs• Each color band shows contribution of one server• Servers are stacked on top of one another

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Heat Maps• Each horizontal strip shows one server• The color shows how “hot” the server is running

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Heat Map with 100 Servers

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Alerts & Escalations for Automation• Alerts provide minute by minute monitoring of conditions• Alerts are tracked through an escalation process that determines

actions as time passes if the alert is unresolved• Actions during escalation can send emails, restart servers, run scripts,

launch additional servers and vote to scale up/scale down


Quick Win #4

Auto-Scaling

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Classic IT Problem

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Classic IT Problem – Solved

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Auto-Scaling Arrays


Quick Win #5

High Availability Architectures

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General HA Best Practices Avoid single points of failure Always place (at least) one of each component (load balancers,

app servers, databases) in at least two Availability Zones (AZs) Maintain sufficient capacity to absorb AZ / cloud failures

Reserved Instances – guarantee capacity is available in a separate region/cloud Replicate data across AZs and backup or replicate across

clouds/regions for failover Setup monitoring, alerts and operations to identify and automate

problem resolution or failover processing Design stateless applications for resilience to reboot / relaunch

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Multi-Availability Zone Deployments

Snapshot EBS volume for backups so the database can be

readily recovered within the region.

Place Slave databases in one or more AZs for failover.

Consider distributed NoSQL databases with the same distribution considerations. Spread

primary and replica nodes across multiple AZs. Place as many as you need for required

resiliency.

Consider local storage for additional slave database to remove dependency

on attached volume (Use LVM snapshots to create backups)

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Multi-Cloud Warm Disaster RecoveryStaged Server Configuration, pre-staged data and running Slave Database Server

• Generally recommended DR solution• Minimal additional cost• Allows fairly rapid recovery


Takeaways

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Cloud ManagementAu

tom

ation

Traditional Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Management

Abstraction

Manual AppsManual Infrastructure

= Slow & Expensive

Manual AppsAutomated Infrastructure

= Manual Cloud

Automated AppsAutomated Infrastructure

= Automated Cloud= RightScale

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Next Steps – Check Out Deeper Dive Contenthttp://www.rightscale.com/info_center

http://www.rightscale.com/info_center

http://www.rightscale.com/info_center

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Next Steps – Get First Hand Experience• Try Free Edition with LAMP All-in-One

• Check out the configuration management, monitoring & alerting

• www.rightscale.com/Free

• Contact us for a VIP trial for auto-scalingand high availability• (866) 720-0208 – [email protected]

• Run through tutorials and examples• support.rightscale.com

Next up in the Getting Started series:September 15From Zero to Cloud in 60 MinutesElon Bar-Evan, Technical Trainer

www.rightscale.com/getting-started

http://www.rightscale.com/Free

mailto:[email protected]

http://support.rightscale.com/

5 quick wins for the cloud

Technology

cloud quick win

test servers

test dev

utilizationwhy cloud

quick wins

alertingquick win

cloudquick win

agendaquick win