Overview/Description:
Discussion on the benefits of hosting the campus card system in the cloud. Topic will cover a general overview of what the cloud is; how the cloud hosted solution can benefit the campus in cost, management, and reliability; the speed of adding increased resources and redundancy; how Atrium built its system to be cloud based.
Introduction
● Good afternoon and welcome to our session Campus Card Systems in the Cloud ● On behalf of the Atrium and JSA team, thank you for coming.
● I’m Derek Neely Partner & CTO at V4 Development (an IT consulting firm)
● In the past I’ve worked for hosting providers such as Peak 10 and have worked as an infrastructure architect at Bank of America
● I was brought onto the Atrium team as the Chief Engineer (Campus Card Solution) responsible for the system infrastructure, design, and architecture.
● Before we being I would like to thank all of our customers that we have had a privilege working with.
What is the cloud
● So, what is the “Cloud”? ● Literal Cloud
○ “A cloud is a large collection of very tiny droplets of water or ice crystals. The droplets are so small and light that they can float in the air.” Weather Wiz Kids ● Computer Systems
○ Similar to an actual cloud in the sky, the “Cloud” in is a large collection of
components that while they don’t float in the air, they form a Cloud infrastructure. ○ The goal of Cloud Computing is to separate of the application from the OS from
the Hardware ■ application ■ operating system ■ memory
■ cpu ■ disk ■ power
● Old days Email server example
○ Single physical server with a limited set or resources ○ Hardware failure or need for upgrade
○ Long downtimes to upgrade or potentially rebuild ● Small history
○ dates back to the 50s/60s with the use of Mainframes
○ use of dumb terminals (nothing more than monitor/keyboard/mouse) all connected to 1 ‘mega machine’ that would alot CPU/Memory ‘chunks’ to each terminal for that person to use
Terminal Services and the use of thin clients allow access to software like Microsoft Word, Excel, Photoshop. Install once, allow many users access. ○ in the M.F. world now the division of resources for use in are referred to as
LPARs
What types of cloud are there? what are they? and who offers them? Different types of Cloud Computing (3 primary cloud)
● Software as a Service (SaaS)
○ Software that is hosted, managed, and provided to the end user with little or no installation or configuration for the user.
■ Google Docs ■ Gmail
■ Salesforce ■ Basecamp ■ Quickbooks
■ Atrium Campus (Case Study Later)
● Platform as a Service (PaaS)
○ A platform independent environment to develop and host applications on. Code interpreter and database access.
■ Google App Engine ■ Microsoft Azure ■ Force.com
● Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
○ Virtual infrastructure/servers hosted independently of the hardware that lies underneath.
■ Rackspace.com
■ Amazon WS or EC2 (Elastic Computing) ■ Google Cloud Platform
■ Peak 10
IaaS Focus
● How is a Cloud built
○ Several independent physical machines all grouped together and ‘pooled’ together to provide resources or services for many end users, developers, or virtual
infrastructure
○ Examples of hardware and software vendors that are often used ■ SAN/NAS (grouped disks partitioned and shared) Netapp, EMC ■ DB clusters MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle
■ Load balancing (Kemp, Cisco, F5)
■ Virtualization (primary focus) VMWare, Xen, HyperV
○ 2 Types of Virtualization
■ Client Installed (OS, Linux, Windows) with Client virtualization software ● VMWare Fusion, Virtualbox are the 2 most common ones ● This is typically only used for developers or sys admins while
developing or needing to work with software that isn’t offered for the guest OS
■ Hypervisor
● SemiOS installed on HW directly (VMWare ESXi ?)
● Management software (vSphere manages the ESXi server) ● This is the primary means by which virtual servers are deployed
and issued by service providers.
● Hosted instances (Hypervisor)
○ Amazon EC2/Rackspace Cloud ■ pay by usage
■ some give ‘edge servers’ that provide ‘local’ instances of your system ■ Good for simple configurations such as site hosting, content providing,
basic web applications. ■
● Managed Instances
○ Peak 10/Rackspace Managed Cloud Solutions
○ Good for custom infrastructure/complex infrastructure builds. ■ more advanced configurations
■ additional DB redundancy or clusters ■ VPNs
■ firewall/security enhancements ■ external/physical infrastructure tie ins. ■ DR functionality
Benefits of using the ‘Cloud’
● So now that all the boring stuff is past us. The overall topic of the session is, so why should I use the Cloud? What is the benefit of it.
● Hardware independence ● Scalability
○ Quickly add resources to existing machines ○ Quickly replicate servers/systems
○ Easy georeplication/redundancy
○ Elasticity being able to temporarily scale the infrastructure ● Agility
○ Being able to support the business needs as they need them. ● Automation
○ Automate migration/movement of ● Savings
○ SaaS case study. Atrium customer had reported a $300k return on investment. ○ Physical server vs. Virtual server
○ I took a quick base structure of what the Atrium system currently runs on and spec’d out a comparable physical environment using Dell, Kemp, Cisco, Brocade
■ 2 x 2GB (Web Servers) ■ 3 x 4GB (App Servers) ■ 8 x 8GB (DB Servers) ■ 2 Load Balancers ■ 2 Firewalls
■ 2 Network Switches ■ 1 SAN
■ 1 Fibre Switch
■ Fibre cards, cables, network cables, setup and configuration ■ Total HW Cost ~$80,000 for the HW alone
■ Hosting cost of HW: ~ 2,000/mo.
○ Cloud hosting the same overall infrastructure in a private cloud ■ 80 GB of RAM
■ 500 GB of storage ■ 2 Virtual Load Balancers
■ 2 Physical Firewalls (Still Secure Managed) ■ Total: ~ 3,500/mo.
○ Cost Comparison
■ Physical in one year: $80,000 HW + $24,000 hosting = $104,000 ■ Over 3 years: $80,000 HW + $72,000 = $152,000
■ Virtual in one year: $42,000 ■ Over 3 years: $126,000
■ Total savings over 3 years = $26,000
■ Ran estimates over a 3 year period as normal growth at the very least would require upgrades and/or replacement hardware within 3 years and definitely after.
● Security
○ Overall security concerns regarding cloud systems is not much different than physical ones. Yes, there are a few additional concerns and risks when hosting in a public cloud but for the purposes of our discussions we’re primarily focusing on private cloud hosting.
○ CIA
■ Confidentiality (data confidential)
■ Integrity (data has not been tampered with) ■ Availability (‘always’ there and accessible) ○ Multitenancy
■ “Walling” off various servers/infrastructures from one another
■ Primary concern of most individuals. Today hypervisors have made this type of concern a thing of the past with not allowing hosts to cross over
one another. ■ vShield (vmware) ○ Where is your data?
■ The feel good of pointing at a server and knowing your data is ‘in there’ ■ Physically insecure?
● Catastrophy, fire, flood, HW failure
*** Atrium Case Study
● When Atrium came to us to architect their next generation campus card solution we needed to build a system that was robust, fault tolerant, and modular. That is we needed a system that could withstand near 100% uptime, able to scale quickly as we continually add new schools with new requirements, and be able to move the application around with ease.
● What we wind up doing was implementing all of the primary cloud types (mentioned above)
○ Cloud based card system (SaaS) ■ Atrium itself is a SaaS.
■ The Atrium team continually improves and updates the system with new features and integrations which are all regularly pushed to the end users (the campus)
○ Hosted in a private cloud at Peak 10 (IaaS)
■ Atrium is hosted in 2 private clouds hosted at Peak 10 (1 primary and 1 DR)
■ Its architected in a way however, that depending on the campus’
requirements, the Atrium system can be hosted completely in our cloud or pieces are modular depending on where the data needs to be stored and maintained.
■ In addition, the individual units within the Atrium cloud infrastructure are clustered together forming miniclouds such that each component are also fault tolerant and scalable.
○ Provides our developers a platform to work on (PaaS)
■ Being that Atrium is the next generation card system, we needed a way to provide our developers an easy way to build and deploy the new features and upgrades regularly.
■ We built the system such that upon code review and QA pass they can quickly deploy their code to all of the servers at once. Ensures all systems are up to date with the latest release and eliminates potential human error when deploying the new features.
========================= Additional Notes:
‘Public’/user based Amazon
Cloud Storage
Amazon EC2 (Elastic computing) Apple iCloud
Storage and Sync capabilities Google
Computing Storage
Application hosting
‘Mixandmatch’ services (many varieties of the above) Microsoft
Storage
‘Private’/Enterprise Level Rackspace
Cloud Servers Cloud Hosting Peak 10
Cloud Hosting Internal Hosting
