Ali Khajeh-Hosseini

@AliKhajeh, @PlanForCloud

March 2013, University of Edinburgh

Why am I here?

Describe our journey… from research to startup

Jan 2009: Started PhD in St Andrews

Feb 2011: Interned in California for 7 months

Dec 2011: Hassan quit his job and joined

May 2010: PlanForCloud v.1 ready

May 2012: Mountain View for YC interview

Feb 2012: Launched PlanForCloud v.2

1. Perfect fit between products 2. Scotland is a great talent pool

Why?

PlanForCloud helps users make decisions

RightScale helps users do it

1st year: $450M of cloud-spend forecast

What the heck is… a cloud?

Server

Rack

Container

Electricity, Water, Internet

2500 Servers

a cloud

Around 60 Staff 30 Megawatts = Perth (Scotland)! 140 Containers 38,500 m2 = 4 ftbl pitches

360,000 Servers 500,000,000 Dollars

h"p://www.microso..com/Presspass/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/February2012/23-­‐02DublinDataCentre.mspx    

Cloud computing has many benefits - Elasticity - Pay-per-use pricing ...

Why cloud?

Animoto’s crazy scale-out

h"p://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/23/animoto-­‐facebook-­‐scale-­‐up/  

Scale-out from 50 to 4,000 servers in 3 days

Zynga’s Z-Cloud

h"p://www.rightscale.com/customers/zynga-­‐grows-­‐to-­‐1-­‐social-­‐gaming-­‐site-­‐with-­‐rightscale.php  h"p://code.zynga.com/2012/02/the-­‐evoluJon-­‐of-­‐zcloud/  

Launch new games on public clouds Move to private cloud when usage patterns are understood

There are many providers and pricing models

We have over 10,000 prices

Example: a MySQL Database AWS Relation Database Service (RDS) - Up-front reservation fee (optional) - CPU: $X/hour (based on instance type and cloud) - Storage: $X/GB/month - Transactions: $X/Millions of I/O ops - Provisioned IOPS: $X/IOPS/month (has other limitations) - Redundancy: double the CPU hourly rate - Data transfer: $X/GB (tiered across cloud)

There are different purchase options - On-Demand: fixed rate - Reserved: pay upfront, lower rate - Spot: Bid how much you would pay - Discounts and consolidated bills

up-front procurement to pay-per-use

Image  taken  from  h"p://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/reserved-­‐instance-­‐opJons-­‐for-­‐amazon-­‐ec2.html  

AWS Reserved Instances

You have to specify: term (1/3 yr), utilization, availability zone, instance type and OS when buying a RI

AWS Reserved Instances Marketplace

Buy and sell reservations

AWS Spot Prices

Bid for an instance, it’ll get switched on if bid >= spot price. You pay spot price, AWS sets it.

h"p://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ladypine/spotprice-­‐slides-­‐postmortem.pdf  

Prices change (feels like there’s a price war between providers)

What the heck? I just wanted a simple database

PlanForCloud simplifies this

How much would it cost to deploy my systems on Cloud X?

Would it be cheaper if I use deployment option X or Y?

What happens to my costs if: -  my system grows? -  cloud provider changes prices?

Software Engs Accountants

Users

IT managers Consultants

How much would Pinterest or TripAdvisor cost

to host on the cloud?  

h"p://highscalability.com/blog/2012/11/1/cost-­‐analysis-­‐tripadvisor-­‐and-­‐pinterest-­‐costs-­‐on-­‐the-­‐aws-­‐clo.html    

How much would it cost to deploy System X on Cloud Y?

e.g. TripAdvisor’s 700K requests/min system on the AWS US-East cloud

$1.7M/year

Would it be cheaper to use deployment option X or Y?

e.g. reserved instances, different types of instances, different cloud providers…

$0.9M/year (using reserved instances)

1st month: $450K After: $38K/month

What happens to costs if system grows?

e.g. start with 410TB of S3 storage, then grow by 25% every month

Currently: $39K/month 1yr from now: $470K/month

It’s starting to get interesting 1. Many clouds worldwide 2. Many pricing models 3. Markets for computing 4. RightScale helps move between clouds

Cost optimisation

1st office: home

Then we moved to the TechCube

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We’re hiring! www.PlanForCloud.com