Many enterprise leaders have similar questions when considering a move to the cloud: How should I optimize my cloud strategy to support the business? How do I help the organization become faster, better and cheaper? How do I increase business agility and drive more and better business analytics and insight? In this webinar you will learn about best practices for optimizing your cloud for better business agility and cost.

1. Optimizing Your Cloud
Karl Reeves
Senior Solutions Architect
2nd Watch

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Key Considerations for Optimization
• Evaluate your current environment
• Optimize for business agility – how can you go to market faster with
more scale and redundancy?
• Cost optimization – are you optimizing for cost the right way?

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Evaluate your environment
• Reassess infrastructure needs
• Select website or application that
requires a hardware refresh or is in need
of an upgrade
• Run a TCO comparison tco.2ndwatch.com

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#1 Start with a use case or an application - Migrating racks vs. migrating
application - and know its current utilization
#2 Take all the fixed costs into consideration
(Don’t forget administration and redundancy costs)
#3 Use Updated Pricing (compute, storage and bandwidth)
Price cuts, Tiered Pricing and Volume Discounts
#4 Leverage Reserved Pricing instead of On-Demand Pricing
(Amortize Monthly over 3-5 years)
#5 Intangible Cost Savings – Take a closer look at what you get as part of AWS
When calculating TCO…

6.  If you lift and shift to the cloud - don’t bring previous
bad practices
 You have more flexibility to control costs
 Run On-demand until you find your optimal
environment
 Consider Reserved Instances once you’ve optimized
 Use monitoring tools and elastic features for traffic/
processing spikes

7.  Monitor and adjust
– Prices drop
– Compute power increases
– Application optimization…
 Create minimal footprints for production and
DR and scale up or down automatically

8. Optimizing for Business Agility
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Shrink large processes from months down to days or
even hours!
Time is Everything!
• Provision, test & deploy faster
• Deploy new infrastructure in minutes instead
of days or weeks
• Faster deployments = increased business
activity = increased sales & profit

9. Business Agility Cont.
• Build redundant & scalable environments at significant cost
savings over existing infrastructure
• Automate your entire datacenter to deploy processes faster
and more efficiently
• Elastic infrastructure allows for fast changes in IT environments

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Cost Optimization
70% Cost Savings
By migrating to the cloud,
businesses on average see a 5-year
TCO savings of 70%
The Business Value of Amazon Web Services
Accelerates Over Time
Source: IDC, 2012

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Tips for Cost Optimization
• Improve application uptime – build redundant systems & plan for failure
• Use a multi-datacenter set-up for little more expense than a single datacenter
• Elasticity – handle spikes seamlessly without provisioning new hardware

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Design for Failure – go ahead it won’t cost much
• Remove the datacenter as a single point of failure
• Think of a Region as the old datacenter
• LAN speeds between AZs

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HA Example ‣ HA at each tier
‣ Autoscaling at web and API tier to
support dynamic site load
‣ High Data security requirements –
HA at IDS, Log Mgmt and auditing
tiers
‣ Can lose entire datacenter and
maintain production load

14. Disaster Recovery
 Pilot Light – minimum services to maintain critical data
 Warm Standby – small instances that can scale
 Active-active – route a portion of traffic to DR site

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Disaster recovery-Pilot Light

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Pilot Light – Triggering Event

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Disaster Recovery – “Warm Standby”

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Warm Standby – Triggering Event

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Disaster Recovery – “Active-Active”

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Active – Active Triggering Event

21.  Determine your actual Recovery Time
Objective
 Provision the minimal solution needed to
meet your RTO
 Test your solution periodically and optimize
based on your results
Key Points for Disaster Recovery

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Take Advantage of the Pay for Use Model
• Configure a baseline and use Auto Scaling
to manage usage spikes
• Schedule your servers!
– Hint: Our backup server costs < $1 per
month
• Change your instance size
– Installs, busy days, etc.

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Manage your storage the way you manage your data
• Think of storage classes
• Use policies and scripting to
move data from one class to
another (e.g. hot to cold)
• Say goodbye to Tape

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Automate your Infrastructure = Lower Labor Costs!
• Make a Template for your Application
• Manage your Templates in a Source Code Repository
– Track Changes!
• Deploy/Destroy 100’s or 1000’s of
servers and infrastructure with one click

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Monitor your costs – keep track of your server spend
Use tools like 2W Insight to track individual
server spend

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Try 2W Insight FREE at www.2WInsight.com
“2W Insight was better than all of the other
products we looked at.”
- Marco Comerchero, Director of IT, SocialVibe
2W Insight

27. Account Optimizations
• Create separate accounts for cost
management and segregation of duties
– Development / Test
– Staging
– Production
• Monitor account spend month over
month
• Create alerting for approaching spend
limits

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Q & A

29. Thank you for your time
Keep in Touch
Karl Reeves| karl@2ndwatch.com | www.2ndwatch.com
info@2ndwatch.com | 1-888-317-7920