RightScale Webinar: While the concept of the private cloud is still fairly new to the world of IT, there’s more pressure every day for IT teams to create and start testing private clouds in their organizations. In this webinar, James Staten will outline the top features an organization should look for in a private cloud and the suggested fastest path to starting an initiative. Michael Crandell will then illustrate how setting up a private cloud for proof-of-concept and testing can be done quickly and for free so that organizations can kick-start their efforts to developing the appropriate private cloud for their needs.
Michael – comments on slide “James, I thought I’d just insert one of our customer slides here on that topic.” need to intro Amdocs as a Rightscale customer before going into detail
Talk to the slideTransition…but many of you are concerned about using public cloud services. You are worried they aren’t mature enough or secure enough so your answer is…
Michael will comment on loss of control bullet and he will highlight Zynga when James talks about “cloud cost more the longer…”
Transition: But public clouds aren’t just about cost optimization, they can enable new business models for your company too. And ignoring it, could be to your peril as there are innovative companies who are building their businesses on this new wave of computing – companies that might just impact your business. Let’s take a look at one of them…
RightScale manages clouds Private cloud partners enable (Cloud.com, Eucalyptus) Together:Speed to implementationPurpose-built solutionIntegrated technologiesMarket view & business model alignmentAWS-compatible hybrid environmentsTwo support optionsOpen source: Free editionCommercial: Equivalent features, functionality and commercial offerings to that with RightScale & AWS
Integrate with existing installer(s)Not really designed for silent install.Application installation requires many manual configuration actions.Struggles with dynamic environments.Automate middleware (e.g. WebLogic)Installation is straight-forward.Configuration is difficult (we use in-house tools)Elasticity is difficult from operational point of view.Automate databases (e.g. Oracle 11g)Silent install of Oracle tricky (we use snapshots).Schema definition and baseline content.Dynamic vs Static TemplateDynamic RightScale ServerTemplates™ give significant flexibility and reuse. Strong feature of Rightscale.Static Templates bundle all components together which makes maintenance difficult. Avoid this at all cost.
Zynga started out with a dedicated hosted IT infrastructure, but its business growth quickly outpaced its ability to add infrastructure. It moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accommodate the rapid scale demands in the vertical growth phase of the company. Having survived this initial growth phase, and gained a better understanding of workloads in the process, the company opted to build its own internal cloud to compliment its AWS footprint.-10% of the world’s internet population plays Zynga games every monthPart of the impetus behind this move was a desire to reverse some of the capex versus opex tradeoffs that it made in earlier stages of the company. This is an interesting business lifecycle decision and cloud adoption consideration. Zynga realized early on that it couldn’t afford the capital outlay burden associated with building its own infrastrcuture at the scale required to host its business. However, as the business has grown, it now makes sense from a financial perspective to own some of the equipment and the associated benefits of the higher depreciation writeoffs that come with it. At the same time the reduced operating expense, from lower public cloud reliance, improve the company’s operating margin profile.Zynga's private cloud, called zCloud internally, is essentially a commodity cloud based on AWS design principles and using XenServer at the core. Zynga manages its clouds, both AWS and zCloud, through a single pane of glass provided by RightScale. This capability was integral to Zynga’s deployment.Zynga shared some impressive statistics around its vCloud build. The entire project went from concept to production in <6 months. Zynga, in concert with RightScale, can now fully provision >1,000 physical servers in 24 hours. From a growth standpoint, between Jan ’09 and Jan ’11 it has a 75x’ed server count.Templates?Distributions?Images?