Top 5 Use Cases for Amazon EC2 in the Enterprise

Transcription

1 White Paper White Paper Managing Public Cloud Computing in the Enterprise Top 5 Use Cases for Amazon EC2 in the Enterprise A Quick Start Guide BY DAVID DAVIS VEXPERT 1

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Why Enterprises Need Amazon EC Best Practices for Implementing AWS... 5 Use Case #1 Cloud Bursting... 6 Use Case #2 Managing Peak Loads... 7 Use Case #3 Backup & Recovery... 8 Use Case #4 Life Cycle Management... 8 Use Case #5 Shadow IT Prevention... 9 Conclusion About the Author

3 Introduction If you aren t utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) in your enterprise today, you are probably evaluating it for the future. The market-leading Amazon infrastructure as a service provides tremendous flexibility to extend, and sometimes replace, on-premise servers with cloud-based resources with little to no financial barriers to entry. Obvious benefits include the elimination of upfront capital expense, ability to access resources immediately, and flexibility to scale capacity up or down, as needed. Today, the typical enterprise users of Amazon EC2 are development groups and independent business units that need IT infrastructures but can t wait for corporate IT to provide it. While ease of procurement and deployment are major benefits of AWS, there are some glaring management challenges including: Lack of holistic visibility into Amazon EC2 usage Loss of control of technology assets Separate administration and management infrastructure Inability to easily integrate with the existing on-premise infrastructure Many enterprises are discovering a significant proliferation of loosely managed or unmanaged Amazon EC2 accounts, implemented completely outside enterprise-appropriate standards. As a result of this exposure, unified administration and management is becoming a high priority for organizations with a significant footprint of public cloud usage. To that end, HotLink built unique VMware plug-in technology, HotLink Hybrid Express, which allows Amazon EC2 resources to be managed alongside VMware vsphere as a unified pool of resources, with a single console VMware vcenter. In addition to enabling a singular framework for all administration, management, and deployment via HotLink extensions to vcenter, hybrid cloning, snapshots, templates, migrations, and format conversions are all natively supported. At VMworld 2012, I served as a judge for multiple Best of VMworld competitions and investigated virtually every cloud management solution at the show. We awarded HotLink with numerous awards, including Best Virtualization Management, Best Cross Platform Management, Best Cloud Application, and overall Best of Show. Afterwards, I had the ability to try the HotLink technology in my own lab. I found that HotLink Hybrid Express was easy to deploy, intuitive to use, and robust in its ability to extend VMware vcenter management to off-premise Amazon EC2 resources. In this whitepaper, you will learn about 5 use cases for which the combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and Hotlink Hybrid Express enables AWS to become an even more compelling resource for enterprise computing. 3

4 Why Enterprises Need Amazon EC2 With Amazon infrastructure as a service, enterprises can gain unprecedented flexibility and business agility with very low financial barriers to accessing a broad menu of computing resources. As a result, many business units, development organizations and other end users have embraced public cloud services generally at a lower cost, in a much shorter timeframe than if the same resources were procured from corporate IT. Examples of some typical AWS use cases include: An application needs to scale during peak times. With Amazon EC2, it can happen in hours or minutes vs. days or weeks with a traditional datacenter infrastructure. Amazon provides unlimited scalability on-demand. With highly variable traffic, deploying an application in AWS can be a significant costsaver when compared to purchased or leased servers. If workloads are running on Amazon EC2 and utilization drops, instances can be immediately powered off to avoid additional costs. Virtual machines can be cloned to Amazon EC2 for backup or disaster recovery purposes. Once those virtual machines are cloned to Amazon, item level recovery can be performed or application / OS upgrades or configuration changes can be tested without impacting production. Development environments can be brought up and cloned at any time, with no need to wait for corporate IT approval or implementation. When development tasks are completed, Amazon EC2 instances can simply be deleted. At the same time, many corporate IT leaders have resisted use of Amazon EC2 in the enterprise for a range of legitimate reasons including: Visibility Visibility is lost when applications are run in a public cloud infrastructure. Core management tools cannot administer, monitor or manage Amazon EC2 activity. As a result, usage and costs can quickly spiral out of control, without warning of any kind. Control Control is lost when applications are run in the public cloud as standardized IT authentication and policies are no longer enforced. Integration Integration between Amazon EC2 and existing virtual infrastructure does not exist for most organizations. It s painful to move virtual machines between environments or leverage the public cloud for backup, recovery, or on-demand computing. So what are the best options to resolve the visibility, control, and integration concerns related to utilizing Amazon Web Services while allowing users to effectively leverage the power and flexibility of Amazon s elastic computing model? 4

5 Best Practices for Implementing Amazon Web Services Corporate IT wants to be seen as enabler of technology services that allow users to perform their activities as productively as possible, in the timeframe needed, at the lowest possible cost. With the right management model in place, this can easily include Amazon Web Services. Best practices for hybrid IT must provide users the power and agility they need while retaining reasonable corporate IT control and visibility. Of course, for best practices to be accepted, end users and their managers must also derive some benefit. Vitally important is that these constituents be able to use Amazon EC2 in the same flexible and productive manner as before any structure was imposed. With extensive experience managing server resources, corporate IT can deliver tangible value by: (1) helping new users quickly, easily, and effectively utilize Amazon EC2 resources, (2) providing managers with tools to monitor workloads, usage and costs, (3) providing automated, easy-to-use capabilities for migrating workloads to and from Amazon EC2, and (4) delivering advice on the construction and configuration of any workloads that will later transition in-house. Given its broad deployment, VMware vcenter is currently the gold-standard for managing onpremise virtual servers. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Given this, enterprises should further leverage the robust VMware vcenter management capabilities for Amazon EC2 resources. After all, EC2 instances are simply another type of virtual server. That is exactly what Hotlink Hybrid Express allows you to do. Once you deploy the HotLink virtual appliance and connect it to your Amazon EC2 accounts, VMware vcenter becomes your single point of virtual machine administration, management, and deployment spanning both on and off-premise resources. You can: 1. Extend existing VMware vcenter management and skills to Amazon EC2 accounts and instances 2. Manage all functions of on-premise virtual environments and off-premise Amazon resources within the VMware vcenter console 3. Enable end user managers to have trusted access roles for real-time Amazon EC2 resource utilization and management 4. Standardize snapshots and templates for provisioning across internal data centers and Amazon EC2 resources 5. Implement seamless two-way migration of all workloads between on and off-premise environments 6. Use consistent enterprise policies for role-based access and change management across all on-premise virtual resources and off-premise Amazon accounts With a unified hybrid IT administration and management framework in place, let s review the top 5 enterprise use cases for Amazon EC2. 5

6 Use Case #1 Cloud Bursting During certain times of the year, many enterprises need to dramatically increase server capacity. For example, retailers need 10X more capacity during the Christmas holiday shopping season, and universities need 2X capacity during student registration. In both examples, workloads significantly increase but only for a limited time. Maintaining sufficient infrastructure year-round to accommodate seasonal spikes is often prohibitively expensive. With the combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink, enterprises can take an existing VMware vsphere on-premise virtual machine, clone it to Amazon EC2, and then power on as many instances as necessary to support the workload spike all administered and managed using the VMware vcenter console, alongside on-premise vsphere resources. Figure 1. Using VMware vcenter to clone vsphere virtual machine to Amazon EC2 As you can see in the above screenshot, both VMware vsphere and Amazon EC2 resources are administered and managed in a unified inventory tree, using VMware vcenter. An additional benefit of cloud bursting in this model is that when the demands causing the increased load are no longer there, you can simply power off or delete all the instances running in Amazon with just a few clicks something impossible to do with traditional physical infrastructure. 6

7 Use Case #2 Managing Peak Loads Another common use case for Amazon EC2 is economical management of peak loads. With traditional on-premise infrastructure, adding more capacity requires you to plan, justify, order, purchase, install, and provision the new servers a process that may take months. With the combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink, you are able to monitor and manage the resource utilization across the combined on and off-premise virtual infrastructure using vcenter management infrastructure. If on-premise resources are overloaded, you can easily power on as many instances as needed in Amazon EC2 and power them off when no longer needed. All this can be automatically triggered using vcenter s standard KPIs and alerts. Figure 2. Using VMware vcenter to instantiate multiple Amazon EC2 instances The ability to manage peak load processing using public cloud resources can be dramatically more cost effective than on-premise resources alone particularly if spikes are difficult to fully anticipate, additional capacity requirements are large, or if multiple groups are sharing the same on-premise resources. A fully integrated management model enables seamless interoperability of these disparate resource types. 7

8 Use Case #3 Backup & Recovery Amazon EC2 is being used for backup and recovery with increasing frequency. Should a disaster strike, a virtual instance, protected in the cloud, could be brought online immediately or individual files could be restored without delay. Additionally, virtual machines backed up in Amazon may be used for DR testing, configuration testing, or OS/application upgrade testing. With the combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink, this use case becomes practical at scale. As I showed you in the screenshot on page 6, cloning on-premise vsphere virtual machines to Amazon EC2 is straightforward and can be scheduled to occur as frequently as needed. Note that the native format conversions between vsphere and Amazon are an integrated and automated capability. There s no need to utilize external tools for this. By extending the VMware vcenter capabilities to off-premise resources and managing all virtual servers in a single pool, Amazon EC2 becomes an easy and cost effective vehicle to implement back-up and recovery across a much wider range of applications in the enterprise enabling even non-critical resources to have an effective recovery path. Use Case #4 Life Cycle Management Developers are among the biggest proponents of Amazon EC2. Product development is a strategic asset of every enterprise, and most engineering teams have significant flexibility to procure the resources necessary to complete projects on schedule. Expanded timelines and delays mean lost revenue. So, if a project is behind, additional resources need to be online quickly. The typical corporate IT purchasing and deployment approach simply cannot respond in the required timeframe. Not surprisingly, Amazon EC2 provides an excellent solution for this problem. Additional resources, in virtually any number, can be available in minutes. With a credit card, new users can quickly and easily order and deploy relatively complete and packaged servers with the required database, application and web server software. Instances can be purchased in a variety of sizes, with a range of committed resources. Without any sort of overarching management, however, a significant divergence typically exists in the build and operating procedures of users who independently establish Amazon EC2 accounts from managing proprietary information, to decommissioning of resources, to cost controls, etc. Moreover, if production releases are later deployed in the corporate data center, 8

9 public cloud workloads are often not compliant with IT standards, and migrating back onpremise is a big problem. The combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink enables development team users and managers to have roles-based VMware vcenter access for unified management of hybrid resources including the ability to: Clone & migrate workloads to/from public cloud with simple point & click Create, use & manage hybrid snapshots Convert workloads bi-directionally Utilize existing VMware templates in hybrid environments Monitor, track and manage team and individual usage Apply automation across hybrid resources Additionally, if standardized vsphere templates have already been created, these can be readily provisioned to/from Amazon accounts. This provides significant productivity benefits to public cloud users by eliminating the complexity and time involved in rebuilding workloads for off-premise environments. By extending VMware vcenter to include hybrid IT management of Amazon EC2, developers retain the ability to instantly access compute resources but in a manner consistent with enterprise standards and guidelines. Use Case #5 Shadow IT Prevention The ease of Amazon resource procurement and use has resulted in non-it professionals often creating and operating sizable computing environments that are outside of any consistent management controls non-standard with respect to policies and procedures that internal IT follows for enterprise-compliant computing. This is commonly called Shadow IT. This activity is usually accepted until one of several things happen: (1) the total Amazon costs become large and finance gets involved, (2) the Amazon expense volatility creates a budgetary red flag, or (3) a security breach becomes visible at the corporate level. At this point, public cloud computing usually becomes an enterprise priority. Strategic corporate IT leaders realize they need to offer solutions to the Shadow IT problem earlier rather than later. Otherwise, a collection of fragmented, overlapping and incompatible processes and toolsets will proliferate quickly among developers, business units and other Amazon end users as operations grow. The combination of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink leverages the existing IT investments in managing on-premise virtual infrastructure and extends framework to off-premise Amazon resources. 9

10 Figure 3. Using VMware vcenter for visibility into of Amazon EC2 instances Figure 4. Utilizing VMware vcenter to monitor Amazon EC2 utilization In addition to immediately providing real-time visibility of Amazon account utilization, extending VMware vcenter capabilities to Amazon EC2 provides a range of new capabilities to increase Amazon user productivity like easy migration to and from Amazon EC2, provisioning from existing VMware templates, cloning, snapshot management, automated workload conversions, and more. 10

11 Conclusion While public cloud-based services are typically hailed for the many advantages of fully elastic computing resources with low financial barriers to entry, management is often ignored. Unfortunately, the lack of a meaningful management framework can rapidly erode the expected cost savings at scale. In this whitepaper, I have covered a range of enterprise use cases for Amazon Web Services that provide compelling economic and time to market benefits, while enabling appropriate enterprise visibility and management controls. This becomes possible through the combined implementation of Amazon EC2, VMware vcenter, and HotLink Hybrid Express. As I mentioned in the introduction, I have evaluated most hybrid IT management solutions available, and I am particularly impressed with the ease of deployment, intuitive use model, and robustness of the HotLink plug-in technology for VMware vcenter. The ability to utilize the existing vcenter infrastructure as the single point of administration, management, and deployment for both on and off-premise resources is a huge benefit for enterprises looking to expand server capacity to the cloud. By implementing Hotlink Hybrid Express along with VMware vcenter, you can easily integrate Amazon EC2 with your existing VMware management infrastructure to gain the visibility, control, and operational consistency needed for enterprise-class computing. Learn more about Hotlink Hybrid Express at 11

12 About the Author David Davis is the author of the best-selling VMware vsphere video training library from TrainSignal. He has written hundreds of virtualization articles on the web, is a vexpert, VCP, VCAP- DCA, and CCIE #9369 with more than 18 years of enterprise IT experience. His personal website is VMwareVideos.com. Contact Us HotLink Corporation 3100 De La Cruz, Suite 207 Santa Clara, CA (408) info@hotlink.com 2012 HotLink Corporation. All rights reserved. HotLink and HotLink Hybrid Express are trademarks or registered trademarks of HotLink Corporation. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners. 12