cloudexpo ny 2014: moving mission critical applications to the cloud

© 2014 Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. / Confidential

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Cloud Computing Expo – NYC

June 12, 2014

Moving Mission Critical Applications to the Cloud


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• Kacy Clarke

– Vice President, Principal Architect at Cloud Technology Partners

• Shane Shelton

– Sr. Director of Application Performance and Development

Operations at McGraw-Hill Education

• Nathan Anderson

– IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital

About the Panel

[email protected] www.linkedin.com/in/kacyclarke/ updraft-downdraft.blogspot.com

@kacyclarke +KacyClarke

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kacyclarke/

http://updraft-downdraft.blogspot.com/



http://twitter.com/kacyclarke

http://www.google.com/+KacyClarke

http://www.google.com/+KacyClarke


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Cloud and Mission Critical is the New Normal


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Modern cloud architectures are hard to manage and scale

using traditional approaches

The Mission Critical Application Dilemma

Cloud Provider

Customers

Employees

Application

Source: Compuware

XML/SOAP http SQL TCIP/IP


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• Missed SLA’s

• Long Mean Time to Recovery

• Gaps in monitoring and operational tools

• Sporadic performance problems

• Data synchronization and placement issues

• SDLC sprawl and inconsistencies

• Over provisioning

• Dev and operational skills and knowledge

• Integration latency

• Manual or frozen configurations

• Compliance or security findings

• Cost savings objectives not met

Lift and Shift Can Result in Cloud Migration Debt


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The Reality Check for Enterprise Application Migration


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• What were some of the key

business challenges you've

faced in preparing to move to

the cloud?

• What are some of the key

technical challenges in

building your cloud

environment?

• How have you had to change

your applications to run in the

cloud?

Panel Discussion: Mission Critical Application Migration

Private Cloud

Public Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

Multi-Cloud


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GE: ArchOps – more than cloud


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GE Continuous Convergence Aka: Full Stack Continuous Delivery

Everything Converges


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GE: Lessons from the journey so far…

1. Plan for Organizational & Culture Change; Communicate!

2. Velocity needs effective monitoring & alerting

3. Minimum Viable Product is essential: Building faster =

better.

4. Requirements must be clear: code-able and testable

5. Empower your teams

6. Get developers powerful machines

7. Its not for everyone at first; keep going

8. Full stack engineers are hard to find…plan to grow them

Our journey now continues with many more apps in the pipeline.


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Biggest Business Challenges?

MHE: 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


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• 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: Our Biggest Challenges


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• 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

MHE Connect’s Biggest Technical Challenges


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Aligning Your Application to the Cloud Isn’t a Simple Job

Traditional Architectures

• Scale Up • Monolithic • Stateful • Infra Dependent • Fixed Capacity • LAN Located

dependencies • Latency intolerant • Tightly coupled • Consolidated /

clustered DB • Rich / chatty client • Commercial licenses • Infra Supported

Availability • Semi-automated

build/deploy • Manual fault

recovery • Active/Passive/DR • Perimeter Security • Allocated costs

The “Old World”

Cloud Aligned Architectures

• Scale Out • Distributed • Stateless • Infra Agnostic • Elastic capacity • WAN, Location

transparency • Latency tolerant • Loosely coupled • Sharded / replicated

/ distributed DB • Mobile/thin client • PaaS / Open Source • App Supported

Availability • Continuous

Integration/Delivery • Self healing, fault

tolerant • Active/Active • Defense in depth • Pay as you go

The “New World”

The Targets

Ref

acto

r

Au

tom

ate


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• The Cloud makes it easy to get whatever resources you need on demand

• Continuous integration and continuous delivery can deliver rapid innovation for all applications

• Development teams have a self-service portal for all non-production environments

• Automated provisioning ensures full security and compliance

• Fully automated deployments are simple to roll back

The Dream: Agile, Fully Automated, Compliant App Infrastructure


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• The application team hires “DevOps” resources or outsources infrastructure deployment

• They choose non-standard technologies, configurations

• Core system monitoring is incomplete

• Security and compliance standards are only partially implemented

• No one is responsible for OS patches, capacity mgmt, or required upgrades

• Operations has no visibility into the deployment as their agents aren’t running

• Incident management procedures have only the dev team on call

• Data movement jobs break and quickly get out of synch

• A major issue can cause a several day outage

• Performance issues emerge

The Reality 1: App Team Driven Cloud Deployment


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The Reality 1: Application Team Driven Cloud Migration


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• The infrastructure organization creates a Cloud Management Group

• They recreate their current tools and environment in the cloud

• They require dev teams to use the current Service Request process

• Automation is built separately by each of the “Towers”

• The database team tries to opt out. So does the security team

• Provisioning and changes still take hours or days

• Innovation is constrained by current technologies and processes

• The Dev Teams bypass them and outsource. See Reality 1.

The Reality 2: Infrastructure Team Driven Cloud Deployment

Network Server Security Storage App Infra Database Operations Support


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The Reality 2: Infrastructure Team Driven Cloud Migration


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DevOps is Not Teaching an Old ITIL Dog New Tricks


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Best Practices: Waste, Pipelines, Metrics and Automation

Remove the silos, the wait queues and the waste

Define Deployment Pipelines

Automate, Automate, Automate

Add logging, metrics and dashboards – including measuring your processes


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• Leverage DevOps best practices to change how application teams work with

operations

• Treat cloud services like products

• Continuous feedback and improvement cycles

Best Practices: Agile/Lean + DevOps + SvcMgmt + SysOps

Agile/Lean SDLC

DevOps:

Agile Infrastructure

Cloud Service Management

SysOps: Cloud Operations

Network Server Security Storage App Infra Database Operations Support

Application Focus Cloud Focus

Integrated Provisioning and Operations Platform

Deployment Pipeline

Metrics and CMDB

SCM and Automation


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Questions?

Thank you for your time and interest.

Kacy Clarke, VP / Principal Architect,

Cloud Technology Partners

@kacyclarke / [email protected]

cloudexpo ny 2014: moving mission critical applications to the cloud

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