andy west – director of technology architecture, pearson

RIGHTSCALE USER CONFERENCE

CUSTOMER PRESENTATIONS

June 2011

Welcome!

Andy West - Director of TechnologyPearson

RightScale Customer Presentations

SuccessMaker in the Cloud

Images, Templates, Builds, Deployments, Management, Provisioning, and the rest of the

Universe

• Elementary (K-8) • Essential concepts, skills, and strategies in reading and

math• Adaptive initial placement learning• High stakes management reporting• 15 years old with several platform incarnations• Currently in over 3500 schools with 2M kids• Successmaker.com

Original Deployment Model

• All software installed on a single server per school

• Called it a ‘schoolhouse’ product• No district functionality or

aggregated reporting• This was the SM2 release

District Deployment Model

• Deployed in district data center• Lots of reports• Release SM3

What Our Customers Want

• They want it all of course (!)• Lots of customers want hosted

solutions while some actually ‘say’ they don’t

Amazon Cloud

Home User

Home User

School SchoolSchool Home User

Home User

A proxy cache can be used for

local content delivery in the case of a slow

WAN

EC2 Instance(Tomcat)

Amazon Load Balancer

All static content is served from a

content server farm

EC2 Instance(Tomcat)

Content

Proxy Cache

Amazon Cloud

Home User

Home User

School SchoolSchool Home User

Home User

EC2 Instance

DB Server(Postgres)

App Server(Tomcat)

Amazon instances are

provided according to scale

needs. A single instance can be

provisioned for a small district.

Amazon Cloud

Home User

Home User

School SchoolSchool Home User

Home User

App Server Tier

EC2 Instance(Tomcat)

EC2 Instance(Tomcat)

Database Server Tier

EC2 Instance(Postgres)

EC2 Instance(Postgres)

Amazon Load Balancer

Management of Deployments• Automation, Automation, Automation• Desired: ‘pushbutton’ deployments• Desired: ‘definitional’ deployments• Desired: automatic recovery• Desired: monitoring and alerts

Let’s talk (Deployment) Architecture• How to get from ‘named’ build to cloud server?• How to manage from an operations standpoint?• How to size the instances correctly?• What advantages/disadvantages over Pearson Data

Center?• What are the opportunities for using ‘elastic’

provisioning?

More (Deployment) Architecture• Several different configurations for different scale• Single server, dual server, multi-server• Tools and frameworks spread across servers• How to manage?• Considered ‘rolling our own’• Looked at Scalr, RightScale, Amazon console, Rackspace

Again with the Management

• Automation, Automation, Automation• Desired: ‘pushbutton’ deployments• Desired: ‘definitional’ deployments• Desired: automatic recovery• Desired: monitoring and alerts

Takeaway #1• Development team should design a deployment architecture• Loop in Operations as soon as you have a reasonable plan• Automate your application deployments(!)

Instance Types and Sizing• Different instance types based on computing capacity and

needs• Types: On Demand, Reserved, Spot • Testing strategy to incrementally move up • Combinatorial explosion of possibilities in multi-server

configurations

Takeaway #2

• Be prepared to test capacity on lots of instance types• Forget about small instances in production

Developer Usage• Each sprint team can now have its own environment• QA had already worked this out with a VM environment• Can help devs especially with QA since there is a

bottleneck with ‘testing’ servers being available

Takeaway #3• Developers will love the ability to provision themselves• Allow it to happen• Force it to happen

Application Health• Monitor KPI’s like memory usage, CPU, local disk, etc. • Scripts are defined to alert based on thresholds

Key Features of for Us• Automation, Automation, Automation• Allows ‘ServerTemplate’ definition

– Includes all the scripts necessary to bring up a server– Allows input variables for ‘instance’ specific criteria such as

tuning parameters• Allows ‘Deployment’ definition

– A group of templates that work together– Allows input variables for ‘instance’ specific criteria such as

a subdomain name

More …• Monitoring

– Uses tools installed with the template that can talk to the RightScale platform application

• Macros– Enable higher level scripting of the deployments

• User management– Can constrain access and control for deployments and

templates

Takeaway #4

• Don’t shortchange operations involvement• Lead the way with the control and monitoring strategy

for your app

Summary

• Engage all stakeholders early• Design a deployment architecture• Testing and automation are your friends• Use it now in development and testing• Pick a management strategy that will work for Operations• Etc.• Questions - andy.west@pearson.com

We hope to see you at our next RightScale User Conference!

See all presentations and videos at RightScale.com/Conference.