White Paper How to Get the Most from Your AWS Investment 7 Best Practices for Formulating Your AWS Strategy Executive Summary Amazon Web Services (AWS) is all grown up. While Enterprise IT is often thought of in terms of a rogue deployment of your applications, or even as a competitor, enterprises are now using it for more and more critical business applications. All the benefits you think you re going to get are fantastic, but you need to set yourself up for success with Smart IT, which empowers organizations to visualize, automate, and modernize their IT operations. Smart IT means being able to have the information that is relevant and actionable in order to make smarter operational decisions. This maximizes efficiency and effectiveness to achieve positive results from evolving platforms like AWS. In this paper, Rachel Chalmers, Research Vice President of 451 Research, and Antonio Piraino, CTO of ScienceLogic, take an in-depth look at key considerations for structuring your AWS strategy, the opportunities available, and the challenge regarding the deployment, cost, and visibility of an increasingly complex platform. Here are the seven key best practices you should be thinking about: 1. Make Smart IT Decisions 2. Be Cost-Conscious 3. Mitigate Risk and Know Your Security Options 4. Apply Performance and Health Choices Wisely 5. Embrace Hybrid Clouds, but Single Management 6. Practice Continuous Operational Improvement 7. Demand Visibility and Control of All Your AWS Assets This paper is an extract from the webinar. 1
Rachel Chalmers, Research Vice President - infrastructure Management, Antonio Piraino, CTO, ScienceLogic 451 Research Chalmers runs the Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE) practice and oversees all research on enterprise infrastructure software, from hypervisors, operating systems and file systems through provisioning and automation layers to application development, performance monitoring and lifecycle management. She is also a contributor to the CloudScape practice and a frequent and sought-after speaker on virtualization and cloud topics. Piraino has 15 years of IT experience in sectors ranging from telecommunications to software development. A noted thought leader in cloud computing, Piraino came to ScienceLogic from Tier1 Research (a division of The 451 Group). As vice president and research director at Tier1, Piraino provided insight to service provider and enterprise clients, with a focus on data center, hosting and cloud computing technology research. Prior to Tier1 Research, Piraino was a technical manager for gaming software development firm Derivco. Piraino started his career in the satellite space, leading TDMA development for INTELSAT. Since then, his IT roles have taken him across the globe, including leadership positions with China Telecom, Telecom Italia, Akamai, and BCE Teleglobe. 2
There are seven key items to bear in mind when using digital infrastructure, specifically Amazon Web Services. Often these considerations turn into rookie mistakes. Use this guide to make decisions that work best for your own IT environment and the business you re trying to support. 1. Make Smart IT Decisions Making Smart IT decisions is vital to a successful AWS strategy. Chalmers states there are several components, including: Realize your competitors are already moving to AWS You re likely to get promoted for using (AWS)...or to get fired for letting your competitor open up a significant lead by taking advantage of Amazon Web Services while you re still trying to make up your mind, says Chalmers. If you re not already pursuing a hybrid model, you can be reasonably sure that some of your rivals in the market are because of the compelling cost equation, the flexibility, and the time to market that AWS enables. You can see this happening in mid-sized enterprises, both in the services and education market, and in some of the biggest enterprises of the world. Even in traditionally conservative industries like transportation, people are turning to AWS in a very big way. Choose the appropriate workloads If you still have an active test shop which requires your expensive, precious coders to be crawling around on their hands and knees cabling physical boxes, you can be sure that your rivals are testing their applications in a fraction of the time to much higher tolerances using some kind of hosted service. Similarly with backup, a lot of mid-sized enterprises have never had a realistic disaster recovery strategy before. The cloud makes that relatively effortless, so it s a real no-brainer to move that as a pilot project to some kind of cloud third-party provider. Consider all possible issues When IT people are looking at an application and when they re looking at the either on-premise or hosted resources that are going to run that application all risks need to be considered. For example, they need to think about the financial, opportunity, risk, compliance, sustainability, and service-quality issues associated with that application workload and with the potential sets of resources that underlie it. 3
2. Be Cost-Conscious Chalmers points out you can save a ton of money by introducing cloud resources, and then you can spend it by having to rebuild or go back to fix mistakes. There is a lot of anecdotal wisdom about cost consciousness coming from usually large enterprises in this realm because they have very complex interdependencies, compliance, and regulatory needs. They oftentimes have very arcane applications that need unusual kinds of support. One of the really beneficial effects that Amazon has had on the market is providing a cost model for varied commodity services. It has forced these very large enterprises to do some introspection and come up with cost models for their very unusual, custom sets of applications. Once you ve started building a cost model around those, you can also start building a model around support and a model around migration. Chalmers says this has brought a lot of discipline into the market that wouldn t have happened if AWS hadn t appeared as a competitor. You can save a ton of money by introducing cloud resources, and then you can spend it by having to rebuild or go back to fix mistakes. Rachel Chalmers, 451 Research 3. Mitigate Risk and Know Your Security Options Make sure that you re not exposing yourself to unnecessary risk by mitigating and understanding your security options. I have done a lot of work looking at the security of Amazon s data centers versus the security of a lot of enterprise on-premise data centers... (AWS) is as secure and they ve been very thoughtful about the way they ve built it, Chalmers states. They ve tried very hard to protect data in transit using SSL and VPC. They ve tried really hard to protect data at risk with options for file encryption. Chalmers goes on to say that [Amazon s] model for protecting AWS credentials is as good as anything I ve seen in the industry. Candidly, their model for identity and access management is only as good as their customers, for obvious reasons. They can offer them integration, but if you re giving everyone in your organization root privileges to all of your resources, there s not a lot Amazon can do about this except to exhort you not to. Security and how to enforce and propagate the principle of least privilege in every identity is something all enterprises should be sitting down and thinking really hard about. 4
4. Apply Performance and Health Choices Wisely 5. Embrace Hybrid Clouds, but Single Management You need to make choices around performance and health and you need to understand what your needs are and what you re prepared to pay to meet those needs. You can design for failure until you re blue in the face, but you really need to know how much up time you actually want. There s not much point in moving to the cloud unless you re going to take advantage of the elasticity and parallelism that it makes possible, and when building applications that take advantage of very large data volumes, be intelligent in data placement. This means you should keep data that changes a lot as close as you can to the compute, and data that doesn t change very much as close as possible to the cheapest storage tier. In January 2013, ChangeWave Research reported eight percent of enterprises were using hybrid cloud, with another 5% predicted to deploy in the next six months. Managing a hybrid cloud environment can be challenging. To get the most value out of these hybrid cloud solutions requires a level of management and visibility that really traditional tools, cloud vendor tools, and point solutions, cannot provide, says Piraino. The topology in Figure 2 comes from a ScienceLogic customer dashboard. This view comes from dynamic component mapping technology, which is an automated way to map out the entire topology of the entire infrastructure, physical or virtual, to a myriad of hypervisors. Everything in blue and green is actually infrastructure that resides on premise for an enterprise. It s challenging, if you look at the blue and green sections, just to normalize and correlate data from things like converged UCS systems and in-house storage volumes that, in this case, come from NetApp, and then associate them, and map them to each other. Figure 1. Hybrid Cloud Computing Usage Customers are bursting to the cloud, where they re looking to connect to AWS via a storage gateway service on the backend of the application in order to use Amazon web storage volume for backups. Even on a short-term basis, while customers update the internal managed volumes, for example, we re starting to see more and more managed service providers leveraging Amazon. In the dashboard example shown in Figure 2, the storage gateway would then be connected from the VM on the right-hand side into the Amazon storage gateway service within the yellow cloud environment. 5
Figure 2. ScienceLogic Dashboard Hybrid Cloud Deployment Even though this diagram shows the topology of the connections and their relative health, ScienceLogic has categorized the variety of metrics necessary to get accurate views of the single Amazon instance with its numerous performance metrics. To mitigate risk and apply your performance and health choices wisely, you have to have the right data points at your fingertips. Hybrid cloud management solutions like ScienceLogic give you this visibility. Amazon makes these metrics available through the API. The critical part is how to correlate and map these numbers to an application of service centers running on your internal environment. You can t make cost-conscious decisions if you don t know all the metrics that you re going to be paying for, states Piraino. You can t make cost-conscious decisions if you don t know all the metrics that you re going to be paying for. Antonio Piraino, ScienceLogic 6
6. Practice Continuous Operational Improvement What really excites me about digital infrastructure is that it accelerates the learning curve in IT, says Chalmers. People incorporate the lessons learned into the next generation of building and deployment and that is an incredibly virtuous cycle. Agile programming paradigms like Scrum and XP put a ton of pressure on IT operations to ramp up much more quickly. These paradigms tended to develop in the web world where applications were being written to elastic cloud front ends, and as they migrated into the enterprise, agile programmers would demand the same kinds of scalability from IT operations. This has been a big driver of the adoption of hybrid and cloud deployments by enterprises. It s also been what s behind the rise of the DevOps movement, and all of these movements trace themselves directly back to the Toyota production system. The idea of Toyota s production system is that you can streamline, optimize, and examine the You need to demand visibility and control of all your AWS assets, and that s really where a watchdog like ScienceLogic can help a lot. Rachel Chalmers, 451 Research results and then feed those results back in for an ever more streamlined and modernized production process. In order to get those lessons learned into the feedback process, you need to demand visibility and control of all your AWS assets, and that s really where a watchdog like ScienceLogic can help a lot, says Chalmers. 7. Demand Visibility and Control of All Your AWS Assets An at-a-glance, comprehensive view of AWS performance and health metrics across all Amazon account services, multiple regions and for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments in a single pane of glass is required to meet all of the best practices for a successful AWS strategy. This is what is represented in the dashboard on the following page; you actually get a view into all of those different components. The ScienceLogic Amazon Power-Pack includes monitoring templates that pull extensive performance health and cost information. ScienceLogic is vendor agnostic, so you ll see everything across all Amazon accounts and services for as far back as you need to be able to see it to make smarter business decisions moving forward. Finally, extensive reports and dashboards provide configuration info, key performance metrics, and historic trending and future estimates of Amazon costs, too. It s important while you re operating in that cloud environment to not just have a snapshot or an accumulation of costs, but to also have some sort of ongoing or trending ability to understand what your costs are going to be going forward and where your workloads are best leveraged and utilized. 7
Figure 3: ScienceLogic AWS Power-Pack Dashboard By showing this information side-by-side and over time, the ScienceLogic tool allows you to be a smart conservator of your IT budget with the knowledge to move instances to more costeffective regions while still preserving acceptable performance versus risk levels. When you have the appropriate data points and visibility into your IT infrastructure, and operational performance within Amazon or any of the other cloud platforms on a holistic basis, you can make Smart IT decisions. As your use of AWS grows and you deploy hybrid cloud solutions, it s more and more important to deploy the right monitoring tools for the high visibility needed. Watch the video to see the full responses to these questions and gather more in-depth information on formulating a successful AWS strategy. Or contact us at info@sciencelogic.com and we ll be glad to give you more information. 8
About ScienceLogic ScienceLogic delivers the next generation IT monitoring platform for the network of everything. Over 15,000 global Service Providers, enterprises, and government organizations rely on ScienceLogic every day to significantly enhance their IT operations. With over 1,000 dynamic management Apps included in the platform, our customers are able to intelligently maximize efficiency, optimize operations, and ensure business continuity. We deliver the scale, security, automation, and resiliency necessary to simplify the ever-expanding task of managing resources, services, and applications that are in constant motion. ScienceLogic won InfoWorld s 2013 Technology of the Year award, Red Herring s Global 100 Award, Deloitte s Technology Fast 500, and MSPmentor 250, among other worldwide recognitions of excellence. For more information, visit www.sciencelogic.com. Contact Us Americas +1.800.724.5644 info@sciencelogic.com Europe +44 (0) 203.603.9889 info-eu@sciencelogic.com Asia-Pacific +61 2 9959 2426 info-apac@sciencelogic.com 2014 ScienceLogic, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Phone: +1.800.724.5644 info@sciencelogic.com www.sciencelogic.com 9