Knocking On Heavens Door

The business reality of doing business in the cloud.

Who Am I?

• AJ McKee

• Systems Manager for 10+ years

• IT Manager for 5

• Consultant and contractor

• Founding Member of Rush Hour Analytics

Cloud Computing

• Identify Your Needs• Locating a suitable provider• Working with your IT department• Hidden Costs• Technical Challenges• Quick Wins• Questions

Identifying Cloud Needs

• Examine all aspects of the business• Talk to your teams and assess their needs• Find the quick wins on non essential

services first• Identify your current virtual offerings• Resist the BORG approach to assimilate

everything• Don’t be afraid of thinking outside the box

Finding a Provider

• Many providers already out there–Amazon AWS–Google App Engine–Hosting 365 (Irish Too )–Sales Force–Go Grid–Level 3 –Joyent

Finding a Provider

• Key to locating one is to let others do the work for you

• Research their offerings

• Find out what the developer community is saying

• PAYG Model is best at the start

Finding a Provider

• Avoid the cool factors

• Test, Test and then Test some more!

• Assess their Capabilities

• Identify Potential Legal Issues

• Identify all the costs, not just the compute unit cost

IT Departments & The Cloud

• Otherwise referred to as the FOG

• Change will always be resisted

• You have to get buy in from them

• Outline the disadvantages as well as the advantages to them

IT Departments & The Cloud

• Listen to them

• Give them all their own instance

• Ensure they KISS

• Assign each member a primary cloud role

• Act as secondary to another

IT Departments & The Cloud

• Treat Virtual Hosts as real machines

• Apply your ITIL best practices to the Cloud

• Appoint a SW Dev Liaison and Vice Versa

• Give them time to get their heads around things

IT Departments & The Cloud

• Documentation

• Documentation

• Documentation

• More Documentation

• Always make sure you have some

Costs

• All providers fairly upfront about costs

• Think in Pounds, Yen, Euro, Dollars but not cents!

• Bigger is not better!

• Do the math first then set yourself an Upper Limit

Costs

• Getting up and running can be expensive

• Your own infrastructure needs to work

• You will find you repeat certain things

• Its not Fire & Forget, once in, it must be maintained

Costs

• Backups are needed don’t rely on the provider

• Migration in costs

• Migration out costs more usually

• Security, Auditing, Disaster Recover etc, all need to be done in the cloud too.

Some Tech Challenges

• Data Persistence

• Redundancy

• DNS

• Sharing Data between nodes

• Node awareness

• Transferring large datasets quickly

Some Very Quick Wins

• Remote Monitoring

• Sharing Large Files instead of mailing them

• Run a WIKI

• Remote Hot Site

Examples

• Video Processing Story Site

• Training Systems

• Application Testing Systems

• Automated Build Systems

• Rush Hour Data Collectors

Questions

Contact

• aj@rushhouranalytics.com

• +353 (0)86 380 50 70

• @ajmckee

• Google AJ McKee

• http://rushhouranlytics.com

• http://aj.mc-kee.com