Session Presented @IndicThreads Cloud Computing Conference, Pune, India ( http://u10.indicthreads.com ) ------------ The concept of cloud computing is quickly scaling the chasm between hype and reality. Cloud Computing is rapidly becoming popular amongst enterprises that realize the benefits of shared infrastructure, lowered costs and minimal management overheads. But not all organizations and applications may benefit from a cloud computing platform. A legacy application ported in a native fashion to a cloud computing platform may not utilize any of the platform’s USPs at all. More importantly, wrong choice of platform can be disastrous. Deciding the optimal cloud vendor or platform for your requirements is a complex task. Consider the plethora of choices available in the world of cloud computing: * Public Cloud or Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud * Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Amazon AWS, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid, Terremark, * Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, Heroku * Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Salesforce, Netsuite, Google Apps, saas.com * Should you use IaaS, PaaS or SaaS for your application? * Which cloud database fits your application? SimpleDB, SQL, RDS, Hadoop? We will discuss the various business and technology factors to consider, while choosing a cloud vendor. We will explore the pros and cons of various cloud vendors and their offerings. Lastly, we will also discuss some real-life use-cases of applications and servers being migrated to cloud computing and what factors led to selection of a particular cloud vendor. Takeaways from the session This talk would serve as an introduction to a wide variety of cloud computing platforms. The audience would be able to answer questions like: “What options are available for cloud computing?”, “What are their pros and cons?”, “Should I consider migrating my application or server to the cloud?”, “Should I use IaaS, PaaS or SaaS?”, “Which is the best cloud vendor for my use-case?”

1. Cloud Computing: Making the right choices
Kalpak Shah
Clogeny Technologies Pvt Ltd
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2. About Me
Kalpak Shah
Founder & CEO, Clogeny Technologies
Passionate about economics and technology evolving
through cloud computing
Leading innovation on exciting projects across the cloud
computing stack
@ kalpak@clogeny.com
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3. Agenda
Cloud Computing Overview
Cloud Spectrum
Infrastructure as a Service Description
Platform as a Service Comparison
Software as a Service Examples
Ways to “Cloudify”
Cloud Mobility – federated clouds, cloud bursting
Private Cloud platforms
Microsoft Azure – Covering the cloud stack
Business Considerations & Examples
Questions
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4. Cloud Computing Overview
Elasticity Programmability
Pay as you go Fully automated
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5. Why do we want to go to the cloud?
No CAPEX, only OPEX
Reduced IT administration & managed services costs
Elasticity: Fast & Inherent scale-up and scale-down
Variable & unpredictable loads
Ideal loads for the cloud
Commoditization of IT
Only storage, only content delivery, only messaging
Programmability – Automation
Tools and ecosystem: Pay-as-you-go
Reduced time-to-market: Focus on core competency
Buzz… - Variety of options
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6. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Pay-as-you-go Virtualized Resources – CPU, Storage, Network
Infrastructure management services & tools
Application cannot dynamically scale on-demand
Local Server moved into the cloud – managing, patching,
securing, monitoring is still a responsibility
Extremely flexible
Very little vendor lock-in
Examples: Amazon EC2, Terremark vCloud, GoGrid Cloud,
Rackspace Cloud
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7. Considerations for IaaS - 1
Support & HelpDesk
email, phone, 24x7
Hardware & Performance
Operating System Support
Distribution versions and range of support
Imaging of server?
Distribution and re-selling of images?
Software availability and partner network
Middleware?
Database layer?
For example, Amazon EC2 has partnered with IBM, Symantec,
Microsoft, Redhat, Oracle, etc. to provide a wide variety of pre-
packaged software
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8. Considerations for IaaS - 2
APIs / Ecosystem
Bindings in various languages – maintenance, backward
compatibility
Tools and ecosystem
Licensing
Big pain from our experience!
Brings limitations to cloud migration
Ex: IBM Websphere clustering not available on EC2
Ex: Windows licenses cannot be migrated from local datacenter
to cloud
Other services
Databases storage, backups, monitoring, auto-scaling, load-
balancing, messaging, etc.
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9. Let’s compare IaaS Vendors
OS Disk Choice of Tools / Perform-
Hosting
Support Persistence resources Ecosystem ance
Good but
Amazon Extensive – by a
not Yes & No Medium Ideal ?
AWS long way
flexible
Rackspace Limited Yes Limited Good Good ?
Limited
GoGrid but Yes Limited Medium Good ?
growing
Extensive
Terremark Yes Extensive Very limited Not good ?
& Flexible
Performance needs to be tested for various applications across vendors.
Lot of variation depending on CPU, network or disk bound application.
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10. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Scalable platform, hosted framework to develop and deploy
applications
Development language and platform decided by vendor
No infrastructure management headaches
No licensing concerns
Scalability & availability are managed by the vendor
Little flexibility – limited to choices provided by vendor
Vendor lock-in concerns
Examples: Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, Heroku
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11. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Consumer facing – Business oriented
Business layer is provided – extensions can be written
Very similar to traditional hosting but with cloud models
Consumed over the web
No flexibility
Almost complete vendor lock-in unless vendor follows
standards for data extraction
Examples:
SalesForce
Google Apps
Box.net
ZOHO
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12. Storage-as-a-Service
Storage – attractive to store in the cloud
Populated & consumed in the cloud
Enterprise usage increasing
No management overhead, backups, disaster recovery
Amazon S3 provides all in $15 cents/GB/month
Pricing to the tune of $5 per month for unlimited storage
High consumer penetration
Examples
Mozy from EMC
Amazon S3
Rackspace CloudFiles
Carbonite
DropBox
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13. Comparing PaaS & SaaS Vendors
Development language & available skill-sets
Google AppEngine supports Java & Python frameworks
Heroku is a Ruby on Rails Cloud platform
Microsoft Azure has a PaaS offering
Cost of development
Ease of deployment & maintenance
Size of vendor & ecosystem maturity
Tools, monitoring, connectors, adaptors – will my development
time be reduced?
Maturity of APIs & bindings available
Does vendor allow private cloud integration?
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14. The Cloud Spectrum
IaaS PaaS SaaS
Amazon Force.com SalesForce
GoGrid Google AppEngine Google Apps
Terremark Microsoft Azure Microsoft Live
Rackspace EngineYard NetSuite
Linode Heroku Many others….
Others…
Application User Interface,
API
API, IDE, Libraries,
Tools, Connectors Business Layer
API, Connectors, Tools,
Services App Framework App Framework
Compute Compute Compute
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15. Cloud Layer - Visibility
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16. Ways to Cloudify - 1
Public Clouds
Large datacenters with cloud capabilities
Provide many services – CPU, storage, CDN, Databases, Messaging,
Monitoring, Load balancing
Large enterprises face security, latency and bandwidth hurdles
Private Clouds
Normal on-premise datacenters with cloud capabilities
Elasticity, Self-service, Pay-as-you-go, programmability
Higher utilization levels and management flexibility
Offerings from VMWare, IBM, Microsoft, Eucalyptus for Infrastructure
Private setups of PaaS also available from Intalio, Wolf frameworks,
etc.
Cloud bursting is an option
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17. Ways to Cloudify - 2
Hybrid Clouds
Best of both public and private clouds
Disaster recovery and business continuity
Regulation & compliance issues
Seamless scalability
VPN approach – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
IBM Private Cloud
Ex: Websphere cluster with some nodes in public cloud
Windows Azure AppFabric
On-premise & cloud database remains in sync through use
of this layer
Shared Windows framework gives unique advantage to
Microsoft
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18. Ways to Cloudify - 3
SaaS
CRM, accounting, taxation
Any business or domain
Virtual Desktops
Client virtualization & application streaming
Trainings, virtualized desktops, centralized management
Mixture of IaaS & SaaS
Cloud Storage
Backup
Collaboration
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19. Cloud Mobility – Federated, Bursting
OS Images
Hybrid
Cloud Applications
Control Data
Management
Management
Virtualization
Bridge Virtualization
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Public Clouds Private Clouds
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20. Interesting Private Cloud Platforms - 1
Eucalyptus
Open-source IaaS cloud computing platform
Compatible with Amazon’s AWS enabling (almost) seamless
movement with AWS
Supports VMWare, Xen and KVM
Extremely flexible and easy to administer
VMWare vCloud
“Run, secure and manage applications in the private cloud or
have them federated on-demand to partner-hosted public
clouds with VMware vCloud”
Forging partnerships with public cloud providers like
Terremark
Expensive but worth it!
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21. Interesting Private Cloud Platforms - 2
Appistry
Application platform for private, public and hybrid clouds
Can be hosted on private data center, EC2, Terremark, etc
CloudIQ Manager – Application Deployment and Management
Software
CloudIQ Engine – Cloud Application Server for App Scalability and
deployment
CloudIQ Storage – Distributed Storage System for Data
management across the cloud
Other platforms:
Rackspace – OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Storage
CloudStack – formerly VMOps: Open source and enterprise
editions
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22. Microsoft Azure
Cloud Services Operating System
Development, service hosting and service management environment
Integrates with existing on-premises environment – Windows
Framework
Provides services across the cloud stack: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
End-to-end services
Private Cloud Integration
SQL Azure, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM
Visual Studio as development and testing environment
Supports multiple development languages
Unique positioning in the market!
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23. Cloud Databases
Relational databases
Traditional databases like SQL, MySQL, Oracle
Should be used for quick porting of legacy applications
Known loads & ability to serve them
Scaling & performance needs to be managed
Quicker development time & skills available
Amazon’s MySQL based Relational Database Service (RDS) is
interesting
NoSQL databases
SimpleDB, Hadoop, BigTable
Non-relational databases
Supported & managed by the cloud vendor (in some cases)
Inherent flexibility and scale 23

24. Business Considerations - 1
Licensing
Still not pay-as-you-go
Per-CPU pricing, flat fees, limitations
Can spoil cloud pricing and make it unattractive
Expected to get better with time
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Around 99.9% for most vendors but read the fine print…
Still evolving – sometimes does not meet enterprise
demands
Notification onus on customer, all commodities are not
covered, limited liability
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25. Business Considerations - 2
Pricing
Complex pricing – difficult to estimate without testing
No APIs for automation
Examples:
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests on Amazon EBS
$0.01 / 10K storage transactions on Azure
Geography & Government laws
Location of datacenters
Compliance
Protocol Support
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26. Thank You!!
Questions?
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27. Example Cloud Migrations
Porting existing stand-alone application to cloud platform
Reach out to global customers without high sales cost
Save normal hosting costs since load would be arbitrary
Extremely CPU intensive
IaaS or PaaS?
Analytics application to be written on cloud platform
Application being written from scratch
Basic load can be estimated – scaling amount and times cannot be
estimated
Cannot use virtualization locally as it affects performance
Client ready for CAPEX to save costs over a period of time
Application architecture designed as per plan to utilize public
clouds
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