Business, Cloud Computing, Use Cases, Challenges, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Databases, MySQL, LAMP, Performance, Scalability, Business Continuity Planning

1. BUSINESS IN THE CLOUD
Advantages & Challenges

2. ABOUT: SEAN HULL
20 Years Professional Technology Experience
Speaker IOUG, NYOUG, Meetups
Online: DBJ, OTN, IOUG Select, ChangeThis
Experience with 1/2 Dozen Cloud Hosted Firms
Book Author: Oracle & Open Source - O’Reilly 2001

3. INTRODUCTION
Oracle on Sun >> Oracle on Commodity Hardware
Migration to Cloud Hosted Applications
Lower SLA, Less Reliable Servers & Disk Perf
Economic Pressure Trumps Quality & Performance
Flexibility in Deployments
Flexibility in Spending

4. CLOUD ADVANTAGES
On-demand Compute Power
Low Up-front Costs
Autoscaling
Easier Disaster Recovery & Compromise Response
Disciplined Deployments, IaaS & Automation
Availability Zones & Regions

5. CLOUD CHALLENGES
Performance
SLAs & Server Reliability
Security Considerations
Database Considerations
New Paradigm & Learning Curve

6. CHALLENGE: PERFORMANCE
EBS Volumes Can Be Spotty - Use RAID0
Experience at Co. in Group Buying Space
4x EBS Vols in RAID0 Brought 3.5x Speedup
1Gb Ethernet Saturation Point
CPU Contention - Consider Dedicated Instances
Use EBS Rooted Servers - Not Instance Store

7. CHALLENGE: UNRELIABILITY
Automate Server Spinups
Perform Firedrill Tests & Document
Deploy In Multiple Availability Zones & Regions
Employ Automated Monitoring Systems
Consider Geographically Distributed Load Balancing

8. CHALLENGE: SECURITY
Location of Data & Compliance
Potential Bugs in Virtualization Software
Managing Credentials
Password Recovery Mechanisms

9. CHALLENGE: SECURITY
No Perimeter Security
Use Security Groups - Mimic Firewall/VPN
Use Principle of Least Privilege
Consider Virtual Private Cloud
Consider 3rd Party Solutions

10. CHALLENGE: SECURITY
Cloud Provider Problems
Overly Broad Subpoena Against Them
Fails to Protect Network
Goes Out of Business

11. CHALLENGE: SECURITY
Take Care in Choosing Secure Base AMIs
Don’t Store Sensitive Data in an AMI
Pass In Credentials at Spinup Time
Avoid Additional Default Accounts Baked In
Consider Intrusion detection & Apparmor
Bake In Packages to Avoid Version Changes

12. CHALLENGE: DATABASES
Perform Replication Integrity Checking
Backups: Logical, Hot Backups & Offsite Backups
Use EBS Volumes & Software RAID0
Vertical & Horizontal Scaling
Use Availability Zones to Improve HA, Mitigate SLA
Consider Encryption for FS & Network Traffic

13. CHALLENGE: DATABASES
Automate Spinups & Check for DB Mount
War Story - Production Outage
Targeted Ad Business - Hosted on EC2
Rightscale Managed - Third Party Monitored
Templated Replication Rebuild

14. CHALLENGES: DATABASES
RDS Offering
Downtime Window - 30min/week
Slightly Cumbersome Config Changes
Still Need to Perform Integrity Checking
Beware Version Upgrades
Can’t Use Percona, Can’t Encrypt Filesystem

15. CHALLENGE: LEARNING
CURVE
Server Spinups, AMIs, Shifting IP Addresses
Automation Requires More Forethought
Devops - Manage Infrastructure as Code
Security Groups, Credentials Mgmt, Encryption
Provisioning, Metered Spending Rate

16. FURTHER QUESTIONS
What Types of Applications Make Sense?
How Do I Build for Performance and Scalability?
How Does On-Demand Change Provisioning?
What About Mgmt Platforms & Frameworks?

17. Q: WHAT TYPES OF APPS?
Apps with Seasonal Traffic Patterns
One-off Needs
Short-term Requirements
Augmenting Quickly
Dev & Test Environments

18. Q: BUILD FOR SCALABILITY?
Build Separate Databases for Read & Write
Check Freshness of Data - Replication Lag
Be Careful of Stale Data
Bake Read/Write Connections Into Application

19. Q: ON-DEMAND &
PROVISIONING
Larry Summers - “Preserving Optionality”
Spending Now Controled by Software
Costs for Storage, Network, Instances, Elastic IPs

20. Q: PLATFORMS &
FRAMEWORKS
Rightscale, Scalr, Cloudkick - dashboards
Chef, Puppet, cfengine - configuration management
AWS Cloud Formation - templates
AWS Elastic Beanstalk - full stack automation

21. CONCLUSION
Do You Have Existing Investments in Physical Servers?
Hybrid Approach With Slow Cautious Adoption
Does Your App Exhibit Seasonal Traffic Patterns?
The Cloud is Uniquely Suited To Your Needs
Are You Paying a Lot for DR Systems Currently?
A Fully Scripted EC2 Deployment Could Save Big

22. ABOUT - SEAN HULL
20 Years Professional Technology Experience
Linux, MySQL, Web Operations & Scalability
EC2, Rackspace Cloud & Rightscale Expertise
hullsean @ GMAIL.com
www.iheavy.com/blog/
www.twitter.com/@hullsean