The document discusses challenges with moving mission critical applications to the cloud. It describes how traditional "lift and shift" migrations can result in issues meeting SLAs, long recovery times, gaps in monitoring, and other problems due to a lack of optimization for the cloud. The panelists from GE Capital and McGraw-Hill Education discuss their experiences with key business challenges like organizational change and technical challenges including replacing load balancers and issues with proprietary software in the cloud. The document advocates adopting cloud-native architectures and DevOps practices to better align applications with cloud capabilities and automate deployments.

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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
kacy.clarke@cloudtp.com
www.linkedin.com/in/kacyclarke/
updraft-downdraft.blogspot.com
@kacyclarke
+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/SOAPhttp 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
Refactor
Automate

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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 ServerSecurity 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 ServerSecurity 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 / kacy.clarke@cloudtp.com