what the heck is cloud?

What the Heck is Cloud?

Erik Carlin

Senior Architect, Rackspace Cloud Division

erik.carlin@rackspace.com

Date: April 16, 2010

Prepared for: Rackspace Non-Profit Technology Conference

EC2Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

GAEGoogle App Engine

TRCThe Rackspace Cloud

Bonus…

BingBut It’s Not Google

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Cloud Confusion

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

- Larry Ellison, 9/08

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The Cloud is…

Grid?Utility Computing?

Virtualization?

Programmatic?On-demand?

xaaS? Scalable?

Usage-based billing?

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Understanding the Cloud

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Cloud Forerunner

Edison dynamo, circa 1884

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From Electricity to IT

“The bulk of business computing [will shift] out of private data centers and into the cloud.”

- Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch

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Defining the Cloud

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Cloud Computing According to the Analysts

“A pool of highly scalable, abstracted infrastructure, capable of hosting end-customer applications, that is billed by consumption.”

- Forrester

“A style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.”

- Gartner

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Cloud Computing According to NIST

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/

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Five Characteristics of Public Clouds

1. Broad Access

2. Lightweight entry/exit

3. On-demand

4. Usage-based pricing

5. Highly scalable/elastic

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Typical but NOT necessary…

Virtualization Multi-tenant

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Types of Clouds

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Application Clouds (SaaS)

•Ease of Use– Low Complexity

•Flexibility– Minimal Control

•Typical Consumers– End Users

•Examples– Salesforce.com– TurboTax Online– Microsoft Online Services– Rackspace E-mail

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Platform Clouds (PaaS)

•Ease of Use– Medium Complexity

•Flexibility– Medium Control

•Typical Consumers– Developers

•Examples– Rackspace Cloud Sites– Google AppEngine– Force.com

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Infrastructure Clouds (IaaS)

•Ease of Use– High Complexity

•Flexibility– Maximum Control

•Typical Consumers– Developers– System Administrators

•Examples– EC2, S3– Rackspace Cloud Files, Cloud Servers– FlexiScale– GoGrid

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Reasons to Use the Cloud

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Cost Savings

• From Fixed to Variable Pricing

Traditional: Buy enough compute to satisfy maximum anticipated demand

Cloud: Dynamically buy enough compute to satisfy actual demand

– Cost savings particularly significant for transitory compute needs

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Cost Savings Example

•Problem– NY Times wanted to convert 11 million articles from 1851-1922 from raw TIFF images (4

TB) to PDF

•Solution– Leveraging 100 EC2 instances and S3, all 11 million articles were converted to PDF in just

under 24 hours

•Compute Cost?

$240

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-computing-fun

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/02/taking-massive.html

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Time Savings

•From Days/Weeks to Minutes

Traditional: Procure, receive, unpack, rack, cable, configure new server

Cloud: On-demand compute via programmatic call or mouse click

– Essentially eliminate new server deployment latency– Significant time to market implications

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Time Savings Example: New Server Deployment

•Traditional– 72,000 minutes or ~7½ weeks *

•Cloud– 2 minutes *

•Percent Time Savings

99.997%

* Actual data from a pharmaceutical enterprise

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Time Savings Example: Batch Processing

•Assume a job has 100 units of work and 1 server can complete 1 unit/hr at a cost of $1/hr

– 1 server would take 100 hours to complete the job at a cost of $100

– 10 servers would take 10 hours to complete the job at a cost of $100

– 100 servers would take 1 hour to complete the job at a cost of $100

Limiting Factor? Capacity

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Increased -ilities

• More Agility, Scalability, Flexibility…Traditional: Capacity planning (maybe) to stay ahead of IT resource requirements.

Generally unable to meet immediate increases in demand.

Cloud: Scale up (and down!) on-demand

– Virtually unlimited compute and storage available– Enables “just enough” compute so you are only using what you need (green)– Enables “just in time” compute to auto-scale applications in response to spikes in demand– Generally, no commitments– Interesting implications for Dev/QA environments, upgrades, and troubleshooting

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Increased Scalability Example

YouDecide2008.com

•In January 2008, information was posted about the presidential debates resulting in an increase from 25,000 visitors to more than 300,000 – in one day.

Traditional Hosting = Site Crash!

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Increased Scalability Example

Rackspace Cloud Sites = Auto-Scale

1st Presidential Debate

VP Debate

2nd Presidential Debate

3rd Presidential Debate

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Lifestyle Impact

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Reasons NOT to Use the Cloud

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The BIGGEST objection…

Security!The cloud is for everyone but not for

everything. (but remember, cloud doesn’t necessarily mean shared)

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Other Reasons Not To Use the Cloud

• Reliability?– Madden Syndrome: driving vs. flying

• Performance/lack of isolation concerns• Latency• Need more control• Regulatory issues - HIPPA, SOX, PCI• Want a “managed” solution• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Some items derived from this IT Management & Cloud blog post

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Cloud Demo

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Closing Thoughts

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Closing Thoughts

•Cloud is still hosting and hosting requires trust•“As a Service” should come with service•Move one or more non-critical systems to the cloud to get experience

•Consider hybrid solutions•Experiment with backup and archiving to cloud storage

•It’s still early in cloud time, but...

The Future is Cloudy!36

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/

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