Not a good start. The speaker, Eugene Ciurana, is nowhere to be found. Apparently he’s on his way. Hopefully his mission critical apps are more responsive than he is. 😉 He finally arrives out of breath as he was apparently working out at the gym. After he catches his breath, we begin.
The presentation is about how to design, implement and roll-out cloud/enterprise hybrid applications. There are a lot of different cloud architectures: PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Technologies include: ESB, clods, mini-clouds, Java, App Engine, Chef!/Puppet, etc. Cloud technologies lower your cost:
* Which applications are best suited for cloud deployment?
* Identify the advantages of PaaS or SaaS resources?
* What are the caveats of cross-platform and cross-language integration?
* High-performance alternatives to XML serialization for data exchange? (i.e., JSON)
What is the Cloud Anyway?
* Platform as a Service (Amazon, Google, Rackspace, etc.)
* Software as a Service (Salesforce.com, Amazon)
* Infrastructure as a Service (IBM, HP)
* Pure-infrastructure (Data centers)
Cloud Services Features
* Quick deployment of prepackaged components
* Uses commodity, virtualized hardware and network resources
* “Pay as you consume”
* Horizontal scalability is achieved by adding or removing resources as needed
* May host full applications or only services
* They could replace the data centre
* Basic administration moves to the application owner
* For the bean counters… it’s an operational expense!
* Assuming sensible SLAs, the ROI is better than for co-located or company-owned data centres (but won’t achieve 4 9s)
Uptime != Availability. Many factors affect availability: network, storage, process
Hybrid Cloud Architecture
* Many mission-critical systems will live behind the corporate firewall
* The cloud is used for high-load applications and services
* The cloud applications work independentlyof the data center applications, and vice-versa.
Case Study: Video game company with hybrid cloud application
Objectives
* Stable architecture
* Low cost
* Build scalability whenever possible
* Optimal data transfer rate for all properties
Initially, there were some 8 machines that were running everything: QA, PROD, debugging, etc. The performance was atrocious!
Phase 1: Scalability
* Introduces a CDN for asset delivery (media, images)
– Amazon S3 for asset delivery
– Reduces load on company servers and bandwidth costs
* Introduces database replication for production environments
* Establishes a continuous integration environment
– Improved build/release process
* Fail-over with traditional database replication techniques
Phase 2: Cloud Deployment
* Web applications move to a uniform technology (.Net)
* The database and stored procedures normalized and optimized
* Applications use common resources via Mule ESB and services
– No more direct calls from apps to database
– Business logic is implemented as stateless POJOs
* Software stacks was best of breed
* Web and other RPC services must coexist
– Different partners use different protocols
* Bandwidth can be expen$ive!
* Data exchange protocols
– clients: custom, XML, JSON
– images: HTTPD, S3
– Cloud-to-HQ: custom, XML/SOAP, protocol buffers
– HQ data center: XML/SOAP, protocol buffers
* Replication strategy: data centre
– The cloud isn’t trustworthy yet
* Deployment involves using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
* AMIs need a post-configuration step in a load-balanced environment
* Elastic Load Balancer and Elastic IP limitations
And so it ends. This session clearly pitched to C-levels (in particular CIOs.) There was very little meat and substance for Java geeks to get their hands on. It’s a shame. Clearly Eugene has a lot of knowledge, but this was just way too high in the clouds (pun intended)