mcgraw-hill education: global migration in less than 2 years (ent211) | aws re:invent 2013

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McGraw-Hill Education: From US Brick and

Mortar to Global in a Little under Two Years

Shane Shelton, McGraw-Hill Education

McGraw-Hill Education (MHE) Overview

McGraw-Hill Education – $2.5 B education company (print and digital)

– Recently divested from McGraw-Hill Companies

– Bulk of revenue from print business

Business Side

Why Move to the Cloud?

Key Business Drivers – Need for global delivery and better user experience

– Cost reduction over current model*

– Ability to streamline processes for agile development and

continuous integration

– More flexibility then brick & mortar model

– Automation of everything

Out of All the Cloud Providers out There

Today, Why Did We Choose Amazon? Why AWS?

– Data centers where we needed them (AWS and Datapipe)

– One of the most mature providers

– Fit majority of needs*

– Ability to ride demand curve (Auto Scaling = cost savings)

– Superior support

– Listens to their customers

– Overall ecosystem is strongest

Is the Cloud Cheaper?

Cost Analysis Is Very Important – Made sense in our current operating model

– Realistic numbers = More convincing argument

– Sometimes cost savings aren’t everything (don’t tell my CFO I

said this)

– Won’t always make financial sense, so do your homework

Biggest Business Challenges?

Convincing a Large Organization to Move to AWS

Is Hard – Cloud is still relatively new

– Legacy applications in AWS is difficult

– Operational support (monitoring, governance, policy/procedure)

– Financials

– Finding people

Technical Side

We Have to Do What With Legacy

Applications? Proceed with Caution; This Could Get Nasty

– Make sure you know what you have and a plan on how it will

work in AWS

– Don’t be afraid to try different configurations before you settle on

what you want to move forward with. Architecture changes will

need to happen.

– You don’t have to solve every problem before launch

– For the love of God, test everything thoroughly before go-live

A Shift in Mindset

Developers and Architects Need to Work Within

the Constraints of AWS – Make sure to follow AWS best practices when deploying software

on their platform or you’ll be sorry

– AWS is the same infrastructure you use today, and it can and

will fail; make sure your architecture and applications can

withstand it

Our Biggest Challenges

Difficult Situations Encountered – Moving away from F5s to ELBs

– Security approvals

– Dependency on Oracle products

– Not being in control of everything (IaaS instead of in-house)

– Monitoring

MHE Global Deployment Architecture

US East US West (N. Cali)

Singapore Ireland

DataPipe N. Virginia DataPipe San Jose

DataPipe Singapore DataPipe UK

AWS Direct ConnectAWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct ConnectAWS Direct Connect

InternetMHE

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront

MHE Connect’s Biggest Technical Challenges

What Were the Most Difficult Hurdles to Overcome? – ELB functionality

• Limited in what it is capable of doing when compared to internal F5s

– Oracle Coherence for session management/caching

• Was not made for the cloud; strict latency rules

• Can only deploy across a single AZ; won’t scale multiple AZs

– Auto Scaling

• Using Weblogic and Coherence takes a lot longer to scale up a new

server than expected (6-7 minutes)

• Takes a really long time to automate things when you’re starting from

scratch, especially when using proprietary software

Road Map

When Will We Be Done? – 2013

• Move first tier 1 application to AWS

– 2014

• Move 90% of remaining tier 1 applications to AWS

• Deploy to first global region

• Multiregion architecture enable with failover capability

– 2015

• Finish remaining legacy applications moves

• Full global rollout completed with multiregion support for all tier 1 applications

Partnership with AWS Going Forward

AWS Is a True Partner – As AWS strengthens their services and infrastructure, our

products get better

– AWS listens to their customers

– Competitive pricing

– Excellent support

Q & A

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