Technology and Cost Considerations for Cloud Deployment: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Case Study

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… Delivering Solutions

Technology and Cost Considerations for

Cloud Deployment: Amazon Elastic Compute

Cloud (EC2) Case Study

Chris Zajac, NJDOT Bud Luo, Ph.D., Michael Baker Jr., Inc.

Overview of the Presentation

 Hosting Service Options

 Design to Deploy in Cloud: Technology

Considerations

 EC2 Deployment Process  Cost: A Closer Look

 Conclusions  Q&A

Perceived Benefits of Cloud Services

 Reliability: Reliable equipment and infrastructure  Bandwidth: Fast network and broadband Internet

service

 Complete control of your own environment

 Flexibility in technology selections: Choose your

technology stack, pre-packaged or build your own

 Security control (ports, firewalls, access…)

 Cost may be lower: Compared to build up and

Do you need the Cloud Services?



Forward looking

 Do you have sufficient infrastructure support?

 Is my application fine with the current

environment?

 Do you have adequate financial and human resources

to build up and support your own infrastructure?

 Do you anticipate significant and unpredictable

application hit spike and have the method to address it?

 Can I scale up and down swiftly?

 Do you share the infrastructure and are limited or

Hosting Service Options

 Own environment (your own or shared), governed

by local IT policies.

 Typical government agency service option

 Commercial ISPs (shared or dedicated).

 Need IT policy changes such as allowing external

IP/domain

 Commercial Cloud Services such as EC2 and

Rackspace.

 This is a step further than the traditional commercial

Design to Deploy in Cloud: Technology

Considerations

 The technology stack should consider  Free or lower software licensing cost

 Leverage on pre-packaged software stacks as much as

possible, especially the low cost or free Open Source ones.

You have options now.

 For commercial software, check with your vendors on the

licensing approach and cost.

 Easy installation and maintenance

 Less support effort.

 Stable and mature

NJDOT Traffic Monitoring Systems Web Reporting Tool Technology Stack

 NJDOT TMS Web Reporting Tool publishes the location and count

information(http://www.state.nj.us/transportation/refdata/roadway/t raffic_counts/ )

 Stable and proven technologies

 Glassfish version 3  PostgreSQL version 8.1

 With PostGIS extension  Customized JEE application  Google Maps APIs

 File storages

 Currently hosted on an commercial ISP  Web Server and Application Server  Database Server

 No commercial software licenses

EC2 Deployment Process

 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

 Create Amazon Web Services (AWS) account

 Sign up services

 Simple Storage Service (S3)  Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

 Accounting concern

 Credit card is the easiest and fastest, but many government

agencies may have issues with this approach

Set up EC2 for Deployment

 Select AMIs to use. Many options (Linux, Windows)

 Web Server AMI

 Operating System: Ubuntu 10.10  Glassfish is included

 Database Server AMI

 Operating System: Ubuntu 10.10

 We selected two Instances (servers)

 Web Server  Database Server

 Check on the instance details for hardware configurations  Cost impact

Set up EC2 for Deployment - Continued

 Find a Ubuntu AMI to choose

Set up EC2

 Assign Key pair (Access/Authentication) to each of

the selected AMI

 Security key for your EC2 services

 Set Firewall configuration

 Port/IP configurations. You are on your own.

 Review selection and Launch the instances of the

selected AMIs

Set up EC2 – Continued 2

 Connect to your instances (virtual machines) via provided

SSH using key pair and provided public DNS for system administration (additional software installation,

configuration and maintenance)

 Install and Configure your Instances to fit your need (Now

they are live instances)

 Glassfish (Configuration needed)

 PostgreSQL PostGIS (installation and configuration)

 Customized JEE application (installation and configuration)

 You do need to perform installations and configurations

Set Up EC2 – Continued 3

 Postgres DB Server after configuration as shown in local

Set up EC2 –Continued 4

Set Up EC2 – Continued 5

Set Up EC2 – Continued 6

Scale up in EC2

 Register for Elastic IP and associate to Glassfish Web Server instance

Scale up or down in EC2

 We did not go through the following since our

instances were sufficient for the needs

 Launch multiple copies of the same Instance  Create Load Balancers to distribute loads

 Change Instance type to user higher CPU, more cores,

more storage etc

Monitoring the EC2

• EC2 Tools for monitoring services

• You are on your own to maintain and monitor

the system and cost

Monitoring the EC2 - Continued

Cost: A Closer Look

 Instance (next slide)

 OS choice does matter in pricing (>50%)

 Any commercial software cost (in most cases you pay the same

as the physical machines )

 Storage (if you choose S3)

 Live instance does cost money

 You can stop and/or scale down the instance any time

 Need to compare the cost with local hosting

service option or commercial ISPs (they also claim to be in Cloud Service)

 EC2 is >30% cheaper than the commercial ISP we

Cost: A Closer Look - Continued

 We chose M1 large, two instances for the case study

 7.5 GB memory

4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each*)

850 GB instance storage 64-bit platform

I/O Performance: High API name: m1.large  Cost: $5956.8 per year  If we go Small (T1)

 $744.6 for one instance (this is comparable to what we

have now on commercial ISP)

 $1489.2 for two instances

*One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. This is also the equivalent to an early-2006 1.7 GHz Xeon processor. Source by Amazon

Conclusions

 Choose a technology stack that can reduce the

software cost and support effort

 Start with low cost EC2 instances and monitor the

usage. Ideally your application runs well on one instance so that scaling is less expensive.

 You own the instances, and you own the support

responsibility

 Moving/Expanding to cloud has impacts on

Questions?

 Chris Zajac, NJDOT

 Email: [email protected]  Phone: 609-530-4548

 Bud Luo, Baker

 Email: [email protected]  Phone: 215-442-5347