E-Guide TOP TIPS AND TRICKS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU LAUNCH WITH AWS

Transcription

1 E-Guide TOP TIPS AND TRICKS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU LAUNCH WITH AWS

2 U nexpected public cloud costs can arise without proper. It s important for organizations to know what they re getting into before a launch. In this e-guide, learn from an AWS data science chief about hot topics for enterprises considering cloud, including cloud price wars, federation, big data and more. Additionally, get advice on what to consider when you re choosing a. PAGE 2 OF 16

3 MANAGE AWS COSTS WITH PROPER APPLICATION MODELING An ongoing price war among Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and other cloud competitors are pushing down the price of on-demand compute resources. But that won't keep public cloud costs from running amok if enterprise applications are not properly modeled in advance. MANAGE AWS COSTS WITH PROPER APPLICATION MODELING Careful prior to a production launch is the best way to blunt cloud sticker shock when you're hit with an unexpected event, such as a surge in demand or a bug in the code. If that modeling is mishandled, user behavior can negate the value of moving off of in-house hardware and software, said Todd Christy, managing director of technology at Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based firm that, among other things, advises clients on public cloud computing. Modeling really starts on the business side with three core criteria: scale, compute and networking. Volume and region determine scale. IT will need to PAGE 3 OF 16

4 identify events that spur traffic surges. Volumes may stay the same for years, but when something triggers a huge hit to an environment, the question is: Will it be 20 times or 200 times your normal volume? Storage volumes and storage lifecycle drive compute power. Anything that pushes storage is important, especially if it is a real-time or short-term need. In addition, IT should consider both inbound and outbound demands on networking. CHOOSING THE RIGHT APPLICATION AWS offers roughly 30 core services to choose from, but an individual application may require 10 or fewer. Perhaps only two or three services will drive the cost of the application. Most applications don't need CloudFront, the AWS content-delivery network, for example. But some do. That's what IT teams need to find out early, Christy said. In most organizations, initial AWS use centers on test-and-development applications, which are typically low volume and can be shut down at night. Resource demands are small, so the cost to model these applications isn't vast. Taking these apps into production, however, requires a clear understanding of PAGE 4 OF 16

5 their dynamics, especially if business growth is variable. Experienced IT professionals who work with AWS agree that it's easy to blow through a lot of money and resources if you're not paying attention. "We've done performance testing, and we've learned that a lot depends on the language that the application is written in," said Raymond Colanero, a cloud engineer at Medidata Solutions Inc., a New York company that builds cloud services for life sciences. "When we scale, we need to go larger with anything written in.net versus Ruby," he said. ".NET apps run on M3 large instances, where Ruby can run in M3." Ruby is a more lightweight framework than.net, so it consumes far fewer resources. On the other hand, it is less able to handle complex integration with back-end platforms, Colanero said. A successful outcome in AWS starts with choosing the right application. If you choose an app that doesn't need to scale, has a fixed utilization and already runs well in the in-house servers, then moving it to AWS probably won't save anything, said Owen Rogers, a senior analyst at 451 Research, a New-Yorkbased consulting firm. This is especially true if your organization has a reasonably new server infrastructure. "You can't just throw everything in the garbage and move to the cloud," PAGE 5 OF 16

6 Rogers said. "That's a good reason to have a hybrid cloud. Use what you've got, and add cloud on top of it for the unexpected spikes in demand." CLOUD PROVIDERS AND PRICING MODELS IT organizations also face the challenge of sorting through different cloud provider pricing models, which can make costs unpredictable. All cloud providers charge for virtual machines and bandwidth; bandwidth usage is often difficult to control, because the IT team doesn't always know what end users are downloading, Rogers said. Plus, cloud providers don't use the same pricing schemes or even the same terminology. "CIOs are overwhelmed," he said. THERE ARE A FEW DEFENSES, HOWEVER. For spikes in spending or surges, enterprises can use third-party tools to track anomalies. Companies such as 2nd Watch in New York, Cloudyn in Tel Aviv, and Cloudability in Portland, Ore., sell analytic tools for AWS cost monitoring, usage and beyond. Another notable tool comes from Houston-based Krystallize Technologies, which assesses an old installation and compares it to how it would run on PAGE 6 OF 16

7 a public cloud. It will also determine in real time how a deployment is working relative to its benchmark performance. CloudHealth in Boston is another small vendor that checks cloud costs and performance. AWS CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST TALKS CLOUD PRICING, BIG DATA TRENDS Amazon Web Services has made frequent changes to its cloud in recent years, from price cuts to tighter integration with private data centers, to accommodate the enterprise market and branch out beyond its original clientele of developers and startups. Among the executives leading the charge is Matt Wood, general manager of data science for Amazon Web Services (AWS). SearchCloudComputing caught up with him at the AWS Summit here this week to discuss hot-button issues for enterprise customers. Here is what he had to say about cloud pricing, cloud federation, compliance and data localization. PAGE 7 OF 16

8 CLOUD PRICING IS A HOT TOPIC RIGHT NOW, AS GOOGLE AND AMAZON BOTH CUT PRICES STEEPLY THIS WEEK. EXACTLY HOW LOW CAN PRICES GO BEFORE EVERYBODY'S OFFERING EVERYTHING FOR FREE? Matt Wood: We've always known that, a little bit like our retail side of the business, cloud computing is a high-volume, low-margin game, and it's a business model that we are very, very comfortable with. If you look back over the past eight years, we've reduced prices 42 times, without any real competitive pressure to do so. Reducing prices is just part of what we do -- it's part of the pulse of the organization, and we have this virtuous circle where we have more customers that adopt the platform, and they drive more use, and because of that we get to go out and do custom deals with our vendors, and we get to go out and take advantage of that economy of scale, and that results in cost savings for us. We could just pocket that as profit. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But we choose to pass those savings back to customers. We just keep doing these things, and you can expect us to keep doing them. YOUR PARTICULAR AREA OF FOCUS IS DATA SCIENCE AND BIG DATA ANALYTICS. ARE YOU SEEING ANY NEW TRENDS IN THAT AREA? PAGE 8 OF 16

9 Wood: One of the biggest is the augmentation -- not the replacement, but the augmentation -- of traditional business intelligence reporting with more real-time services. Being able to use the two together is very empowering. [Finnish gaming company] Supercell [is] a really good example of that. They run popular mobile games, like Clash of Clans, and they've got 8 million people playing this in one day, on ios alone. Ideally, if you're a gaming company, you want to capture as much of that value as possible. You want to know how people are interacting with the game world. You want to know how your in-game economies are performing. You want to know who's buying what and who's talking to whom and what the drop-out is at a particular level, if it's too hard, so you can take that information and improve the game. Some of that is done by collecting all of the data. There's no limit to what you collect with Amazon Kinesis, which is a real-time managed streaming service -- it's just a big pipe, where you can throw your data in and connect up sensors onto that which sample at different rates, and you can do different things with the same data stream. AMAZON DESCRIBES ITSELF AS 'CUSTOMER-OBSESSED.' WHAT KINDS OF FEATURES AND SERVICES ARE CUSTOMERS ASKING YOU FOR RIGHT NOW? PAGE 9 OF 16

10 Wood: They're asking for things like, 'Can it be easier to access high-value, public data sets?' That's a request we get a lot. There's a lot of data out there. We spend a lot of time identifying and working with publicly available data and making it as easy as possible to use. A good example of that would be the Common Crawl, which is a routinely updated, very large set of the Web -- it's every page on the Web, downloaded and pre-computed and put into an index, which makes it very easy to run Hadoop on. You don't have to go off and do all the spidering and crawling yourself -- someone's done that. You don't have to go to the raw materials to pre-compute all the tags and remove the HTML and all those sort of things -- that's been done for you as well. What you get is data in a format that is very easy to use in a distributed way. You can start querying billions of webpages in less than 10 minutes from a cold start. We take that data and store that and host it for free, because there's benefit to it for the community, and then we make sure it follows all the best practices in terms of [Simple Storage Service (S3)] access, so that is very easy to fire up big Hadoop clusters and run queries against them. SOME CUSTOMERS THAT WE'VE BEEN TALKING WITH SEE A FUTURE OF CLOUD PAGE 10 OF 16

11 FEDERATION -- HOW DOES AMAZON VIEW THAT? Wood: That's not something that we hear routinely from customers at the moment, but I'm not saying it won't be important in the future. What we do hear today is that customers at some larger organizations have typically already made a large investment in an infrastructure. They've got a footprint already. When we talk to those guys, we try to guide them toward the idea that there's not a choice, where you have to run everything on-premises or you have to run everything on AWS. We've spent a lot of time over the last 18 months building out integration points, making it much easier for customers to run workloads where it makes sense. We've built out direct connectivity between their data centers and ours, we've got private storage options, we've got private compute options, we've got identity federation options and things like WorkSpaces, which integrate with Active Directory on the back end. All those integration points help customers make the right choice for their workload. SOME CUSTOMERS NEED TO KEEP DATA IN PARTICULAR REGIONS FOR COMPLIANCE REASONS -- IS AMAZON ABLE TO SIGN LEGAL AGREEMENTS GUARANTEEING THAT CUSTOMERS' DATA WON'T LEAVE A CERTAIN PAGE 11 OF 16

12 AVAILABILITY ZONE OR A CERTAIN REGION? Wood: You actually can't use our platform at all without choosing where your data resides. Customers have to make a conscious decision about where their data will reside on a regional basis. We have these regions, and inside each region are multiple availability zones, and availability zones have data centers inside them. With a service like S3, for example, we will mirror data across availability zones, but what we don't do is mirror data between regions. PAGE 12 OF 16

13 FINDING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY PARTNER IN AWS MARKETPLACE AWS Marketplace is an online store that provides a way for sellers, such as software providers, to market and sell their products to those who leverage AWS and, in some cases, those who do not. The concept is the same as that of other marketplaces, where users can easily find, compare and immediately start using the software or services, which are typically a product that adds value to AWS public cloud services. While the software offered varies greatly, most provide publicly available, production-ready software that also has a strong track record in the industry. AWS even studies the standards of its providers, focusing on those that offer outstanding operations and ethical behavior, as well as a pledge to keep their software up to date and free of any defects and security issues. Of course, this is about AWS; thus, the software needs to be primarily hosted on the AWS infrastructure, whether it's a software as a service (SaaS) or other type of cloud offering. Those approved for AWS Marketplace may need PAGE 13 OF 16

14 to produce proof of at least 10 customers, if requested. The following figure depicts what a typical entry looks like; this one is for Radware. A short description is provided, as well as the technical details about the supporting platform, the AWS services required and the cost of its software or SaaS. The high standards that AWS enforces mean that you're typically able to trust providers listed. However, there are always things to consider when picking a from AWS Marketplace. Here are three pieces of advice: First, make sure you vet the provider yourself. While AWS does a good job of running providers through a process to make sure they are not selling junk on their site, the ultimate decision maker is you. Vigorously test the software or service, and validate its overall features, security, stability, performance and so forth. In many instances, providers will allow you to do this at no cost, or perhaps refund the cost of the testing, once you purchase the software or service. Second, understand the dependencies in AWS. Many of those in the marketplace are there because they run on the AWS platform. Thus, you're typically paying for AWS services (S3 and EC2, for example), as well as for the use of AWS software or software services. You need to understand exactly which PAGE 14 OF 16

15 services you are employing, and how much those services are likely to cost you now, as well as when things scale up in the near and distant future. These are complex cost analyses, considering that AWS pricing will change over time and the impact on the AWS resources you are using is controlled by the software or service. Finally, if you have issues, work with AWS and with the software or service provider. One of the advantages of buying from AWS Marketplace is that you have some power of recourse through the AWS relationship. However, AWS can't force a provider to do anything outside the boundaries of their legal relationship. AWS Marketplace is a nice value-added service to those who work within the AWS cloud. It allows access to providers you may need and gives you a basic understanding about what they do and how well they should do it. However, much like your local marketplace where you buy groceries, you'll have to thump the fruit before you buy. PAGE 15 OF 16

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