andy west – director of technology architecture, pearson
DESCRIPTION
RightScale User Conference NYC 2011TRANSCRIPT
RIGHTSCALE USER CONFERENCE
CUSTOMER PRESENTATIONS
June 2011
Welcome!
Andy West - Director of TechnologyPearson
RightScale Customer Presentations
SuccessMaker in the Cloud
Images, Templates, Builds, Deployments, Management, Provisioning, and the rest of the
Universe
• Elementary (K-8) • Essential concepts, skills, and strategies in reading and
math• Adaptive initial placement learning• High stakes management reporting• 15 years old with several platform incarnations• Currently in over 3500 schools with 2M kids• Successmaker.com
Original Deployment Model
• All software installed on a single server per school
• Called it a ‘schoolhouse’ product• No district functionality or
aggregated reporting• This was the SM2 release
District Deployment Model
• Deployed in district data center• Lots of reports• Release SM3
What Our Customers Want
• They want it all of course (!)• Lots of customers want hosted
solutions while some actually ‘say’ they don’t
Amazon Cloud
Home User
Home User
School SchoolSchool Home User
Home User
A proxy cache can be used for
local content delivery in the case of a slow
WAN
EC2 Instance(Tomcat)
Amazon Load Balancer
All static content is served from a
content server farm
EC2 Instance(Tomcat)
Content
Proxy Cache
Amazon Cloud
Home User
Home User
School SchoolSchool Home User
Home User
EC2 Instance
DB Server(Postgres)
App Server(Tomcat)
Amazon instances are
provided according to scale
needs. A single instance can be
provisioned for a small district.
Amazon Cloud
Home User
Home User
School SchoolSchool Home User
Home User
App Server Tier
EC2 Instance(Tomcat)
EC2 Instance(Tomcat)
Database Server Tier
EC2 Instance(Postgres)
EC2 Instance(Postgres)
Amazon Load Balancer
Management of Deployments• Automation, Automation, Automation• Desired: ‘pushbutton’ deployments• Desired: ‘definitional’ deployments• Desired: automatic recovery• Desired: monitoring and alerts
Let’s talk (Deployment) Architecture• How to get from ‘named’ build to cloud server?• How to manage from an operations standpoint?• How to size the instances correctly?• What advantages/disadvantages over Pearson Data
Center?• What are the opportunities for using ‘elastic’
provisioning?
More (Deployment) Architecture• Several different configurations for different scale• Single server, dual server, multi-server• Tools and frameworks spread across servers• How to manage?• Considered ‘rolling our own’• Looked at Scalr, RightScale, Amazon console, Rackspace
Again with the Management
• Automation, Automation, Automation• Desired: ‘pushbutton’ deployments• Desired: ‘definitional’ deployments• Desired: automatic recovery• Desired: monitoring and alerts
Takeaway #1• Development team should design a deployment architecture• Loop in Operations as soon as you have a reasonable plan• Automate your application deployments(!)
Instance Types and Sizing• Different instance types based on computing capacity and
needs• Types: On Demand, Reserved, Spot • Testing strategy to incrementally move up • Combinatorial explosion of possibilities in multi-server
configurations
Takeaway #2
• Be prepared to test capacity on lots of instance types• Forget about small instances in production
Developer Usage• Each sprint team can now have its own environment• QA had already worked this out with a VM environment• Can help devs especially with QA since there is a
bottleneck with ‘testing’ servers being available
Takeaway #3• Developers will love the ability to provision themselves• Allow it to happen• Force it to happen
Application Health• Monitor KPI’s like memory usage, CPU, local disk, etc. • Scripts are defined to alert based on thresholds
Key Features of for Us• Automation, Automation, Automation• Allows ‘ServerTemplate’ definition
– Includes all the scripts necessary to bring up a server– Allows input variables for ‘instance’ specific criteria such as
tuning parameters• Allows ‘Deployment’ definition
– A group of templates that work together– Allows input variables for ‘instance’ specific criteria such as
a subdomain name
More …• Monitoring
– Uses tools installed with the template that can talk to the RightScale platform application
• Macros– Enable higher level scripting of the deployments
• User management– Can constrain access and control for deployments and
templates
Takeaway #4
• Don’t shortchange operations involvement• Lead the way with the control and monitoring strategy
for your app
Summary
• Engage all stakeholders early• Design a deployment architecture• Testing and automation are your friends• Use it now in development and testing• Pick a management strategy that will work for Operations• Etc.• Questions - [email protected]
We hope to see you at our next RightScale User Conference!
See all presentations and videos at RightScale.com/Conference.