National Instruments

Business Model Driven Cloud Adoption: What NI Is Doing In The Cloud

Ernest MuellerCloud Architect, LabVIEW R&D

ernest.mueller@ni.com @ernestmueller http://theagileadmin.com

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The Short Form

We built a DevOps team to rapidly deliver new SaaS products and product functionality using cloud hosting and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as the

platform and operations, using model driven automation, as a key differentiating element.

With this approach we have delivered multiple major products to market quickly with a very small staffing

and financial outlay.

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National Instruments (aka “NI”)

• 30 years old; 5000+ employees around the world, half in Austin, mostly engineers; $873M in 2010

• Hardware and software for data acquisition, embedded design, instrument control, and test

• LabVIEW is our graphical dataflow programming language used by scientists and engineers in many fields

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From toys to black holes

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Genesis

• Our hardware and software product strategy started to spawn software-as-a-service ideas – some from customer demand, some from internal drivers

• There were existing product to Web integration points but these were uncoordinated and poorly maintained

• LabVIEW R&D greenfielded an internal group in 2009 to serve as a sort of internal ISV for hosted services, the dotCom team

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Challenges

• Poor R&D/IT relationship• Traditional siloed IT department (programmers split by

business unit, infrastructure split by technology)• Low organizational IT agility – 6 weeks to get a server• Uptime problems from complexity and silos• On premise data centers at power/cooling capacity• R&D primarily experienced in desktop software and

specialized, dedicated hardware, not server/Web/open• Consensus driven environment

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Now, Discover Your Strengths

• Strong base of “best and brightest,” motivated employees• Culture of innovation and “do it yourself”• Large Web presence (ni.com) with extensive in house

programming and operational experience• Entrepreneurial internal environment• Significant reinvention/retooling effort going on in R&D• Increasing focus on system sales and quality (performance,

reliability, security) over yet-more-features

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Starting Fresh - Blessing and Curse

Everything was new, so we had to simultaneously develop:• Products• Team• Process• Systems• Code• Operations• System Automation

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The Products (“Hosted Services”)

• Customer facing: LabVIEW Web UI Builder (In early access) LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud (In beta) Technical Data Cloud (In alpha) More in progress!

• Internal facing: LabVIEW.com Cloud Framework Cloud Hosting Operations

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LabVIEW Web UI Builder

• Write a LabVIEW(ish) app, save it to the cloud and run it there. • Build and deploy it to an embedded target and hook it up to Web

services to give it a sweet UI• Also, an experimental testbed for LabVIEW changes• Freemium model – use it for free, packaging and deploying your

app to a target requires a license (compiles run in the cloud) – try it at ni.com/uibuilder

• Silverlight RIA, back end on Amazon (moving to Azure soon) – EC2, S3, SimpleDB -> Azure Wen roles & blob/table storage; Java/Linux/Apache/Tomcat and .NET/IIS/Windows

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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud

• LabVIEW FPGA compiles take hours and consume extensive system resources; compilers are getting larger and more complex

• Implemented on Amazon - EC2, Java/Linux,C#/.NET/Windows, and LabVIEW FPGA

• Also an on premise product, the “Compile Farm”

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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud

NI Hosted Compile Service

User Login& Rights management

Links to user account& support

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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud Cloudlet

LabVIEWFPGA

FPGA Services

FPGAServer FPGA

Worker

FPGAWorker

FPGAWorkers

LDAP

Auth Db

InternalServices

DNS LoadBalancer

InstallServices

MgmtServer Gateway File

Server

Routing

Web

Ser

ver

SecurityServices

License DbPIE

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Technical Data Cloud

• “I just want to upload my sensor data directly to the cloud, man.”

• REST and LabVIEW API that lets you upload and retrieve discrete and waveform data

• Welcome to the Internet of Things• Being built on Microsoft Azure – specific bits TBD,

all .NET

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LabVIEW.com Cloud Framework• Platform that makes the magic happen by providing base

plumbing for developers of SaaS apps• Core Services - reusable Web services and facilities • ILLS (internal login & licensing services) – distributed user

repo and licensing, complete with feed from Oracle and self service user portal; Java/Tomcat, OpenDS LDAP, mySQL

• PIE (Programmable Infrastructure Environment) – sets up systems for you, autoscales, deploys code; uses an XML model and runtime registry; Java – more on this later!

• Building out a core platform? Didn’t that slow velocity? No.

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Core Cloudlet

Browser UserPortal LDAP

Master

Auth Db Master

InternalServices

DNS LoadBalancer

InstallServices

MgmtServer Gateway File

Server

EmailQueue

Oracle

Routing

Web

Ser

ver

License Db Master

PIE

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The Team

• DevOps! Application architect Systems architect (me) 2 developers 1 system automation developer Operations lead 2 follow-the-sun operations staff in Malaysia

• Work with other R&D product developer teams Different orgs (LabVIEW, non-LV software, hardware) Geographically distributed (Austin, Aachen, Bangalore, Singapore)

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The Process

• Agile!• All systems work used the “developer” tools and systems as

part of DevOps collaboration philosophy Revision control (Perforce) Bug tracking (HP) Specs and reviews (Atlassian Confluence wiki) Task tracking and burndown (JIRA/Greenhopper)

• All members collaborate on all aspects of the product• Test driven development

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The Systems

• Cloud!• After a quick cost assessment and experimentation, decided

on Amazon EC2 as our initial hosting platform• Needed control and agility we wouldn’t be able to get

internally – dynamic requirements, fast scaling• Needed Linux and Windows both for software support• Using multiple point SaaS providers for functionality (If it’s not

core, outsource it!)• Agility and time to market far outweighed cost efficiency

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Code

• REST!• All REST-based Web services• Multiple tech stacks - cloud and systems mgmt code mostly

in Java, product code mostly in C#/.NET• Key cloud app architecture concerns – multitenant, parallel,

asynchronous, loosely coupled, APIed, instrumented, resilient in dynamic/ephemeral environment

• Developers deliver tests, monitoring, system model with their service

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Operations

• The “secret sauce”!• Not just ticket handling or “keep the lights on.” Focus on

delivering value to the customer and developer.• Provide performance management, availability, systems

management, incident handling, security, log management, monitoring, rapid deployment

• Inspirations: O’Reilly “Secret Sauce” paper, Velocity conference, Visible Ops book, Transparent Uptime blog

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System Automation

• PIE!• The “Programmable Infrastructure Environment”• XML system model defines systems, services, code installs,

runtime interaction• Runtime registry for systems info and eventing • PIE autobuilds the runtime system from the model –

provisioning, software installs, monitoring integration• Perform orchestration and control on many instances of

dynamic environments

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Results

• Win!• A continuous pipeline of products delivered quickly• LabVIEW Web UI Builder went beta in 2009, 1.0 in

2010• FPGA Compile Cloud went beta in 2010, 1.0 soon• Technical Data Cloud going beta soon• Unqualified happiness with cloud, DevOps approach• Not innovation vs. reliability – new approach gets both!

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Residual Challenges

• Selling SaaS products is a challenge to our existing channels• Managing the collision of engineering and IT technology• Culture – building collaboration, mutual respect, and trust

among globally distributed dev teams, ops, and others (QA, security, etc.)

• Educating desktop developers on operational issues• Maintaining vision through rapid change• Cloud-compatible tooling still emerging

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Where do we go from here?

• Complete the virtuous cycle of agile, cloud, mobile, social• Move to full continuous integration and deploy-on-demand,

necessitating intense investment in testing• Uptake of Microsoft Azure (mostly complete)• Private cloud products• Look into Lean• Can DevOps be spread out into the enterprise? We’ll see.• More SaaS products, and product to Web integration more

core to our product strategy

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Community Engagement

Austin is an awesome place for cloud work right now.• Austin Cloud User Group (acug.cloudug.org)• Austin OWASP (Open Web Application Security

Project) chapter• SXSW Interactive• Events like this one• DevOps and devops-toolchain Google groups• Velocity conference, DevOpsDays, CloudCamps