ROI In The Cloud – Myth, Magic, or Measurable

Mike Gualtieri - Senior Analyst, Architecture & Design, Forrester Research

Imad Mouline - Compuware CTO, APM Solutions

The Future Availability,
Performance, And Scale In
The Cloud
Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Architecture

February 24, 2011

2009

Agenda

 Massive scale
 Cloud economics
 Availability, performance, and scale in the cloud
 Recommendations


An explosion of
activity and
information.

More eCommerce means more of everything: users,
transactions, and data


Yikes! This guy can
persuade a million people
that my product is rubbish

They‟re not just kids. Social networking use among
Internet users 50 and older has nearly doubled.

Placeholder – social media influence


80 million users!

Seriously?

Increasing scale is a fact of life
Huge historical data stores

• Corporate data warehouses
• Historical market data
• Structured and unstructured Web data

Exponential increase in business events (data in motion)

• Real-time market data
• Radio frequency identification (RFID), global position system (GPS)

More users

• More channels such as eReaders & smart phones (20% of US mobile
subscribers now use smart phones)
• Increased expectations for content and transactions

Faster pace of change

• Business must respond faster
• IT must enable continuous business change


Agenda

 Massive scale
 Cloud economics
 Recommendations


Cloud computing is
here to stay.

Please Mr. VC,
please. This will is
going to be big!


The power of cloud economics is elasticity

Peak of 5000 instances

Launch of Facebook modification

Steady state of ~40 instances


CPU performance depreciates more rapidly than that
of other types of assets discouraging long-term lease
arrangements.


Savings accrue when you scale-down

Elastic scale delivers just-in-time capacity

• As demand rises, resources are added
• Requires apps to scale out
• Load balancing governs

Pay per use keeps costs low

• No upfront payment
• No commitment whether you use it or not
• Costs aligned to use

Self-service fuels productivity

• If you can build it, you can deploy it – fast
• API access drives use of automation


Agenda

 Massive scale
 Cloud economics
 Recommendations


Wildly desirable business applications must strike the
right balance among these seven qualities
Quality What it means
Users‟ perceptions of the usefulness, usability, and
1 Experience
desirability of the application.
The readiness of an application to perform its
2 Availability
functions when needed.
The speed with which an application performs a
3 Performance
function to meet business and user expectations.
Handle increasing or decreasing volumes of
4 Scalability
transactions, services, and data.
The ease with which an application can be changed
5 Adaptability
or extended.
Supports the security properties of confidentiality,
6 Security integrity, authentication, authorization, and
nonrepudiation.
Minimize the cost to build, operate, and change and
7 Economy
application without comprising its business value.

Availability

• Monitor application and infrastructure
Monitored for expected and unexpected events
that can detect or foretell an outage.

• Mitigate the effect of known
Fault vulnerabilities by implementing
redundant components and the ability
tolerant to operate in a crippled mode.

• Identify and rehearse failure scenarios
and put in place a support regime to
Fixable quickly investigate, escalate, and
resolve problems.

What does high availability mean?

Uptime %* Downtime per year

99.999% (5 nines) 5.26 minutes

99.99% (4 nines) 52.6 minutes

99.5% 1.83 days

99% (2 nines) 3.65 days

98% 7.30 days

95% 18.25 days

*Uptime calculations assume no scheduled downtime.


8.85 is the average
number of hosts involved
in delivering an online
transaction in 2010.

Investigating and resolving
incidents can be more
challenging in the cloud.
Source: Gomez

Can “dial tone” reliability be achieved?


Cloud best practices: Availability

 Continuously monitor availability from your user‟s perspective
 Implement end-to-end (user-to-application-to-infrastructure)
diagnostics
 Design for fault-tolerance – don‟t let one component take you
down
 Load test to determine your breaking point

1. Is there a
problem?

2. Where is the
problem?

3. What is the
problem?

Performance

• Application response time
meets or beats user
Fast expectations and business
requirements.

• Application response time is
consistent under normal and
Consistent load conditions of increasing
users, workload, and data.

Achieving top performance is a moving target

Source: Gomez.com

Cloud best practices: Performance

 Understand where all your bottlenecks are
 Mitigate bottlenecks
– Asynchronous transactions to boost perceived user performance
– Make liberal use of caching: browser, edge, application
– Use elastic caching platforms eliminate database bottleneck

 The performance for one transaction to benchmark “fast”
 Test performance understand normal and peak load to baseline
“normal”
 Continuously monitor performance from your user‟s perspective


Scalability

• Application can handle an increasing volume of
transactions.
Transactions • Example: mouse click to search, button on ATM
machine
• Bounding: users, connections, bandwidth

• Application can handle an increasing volume of
services needed to process transactions.
Services • Example: business logic, calculations, integration
• Bounding: compute workload

• Applications can handle an increasing volume of
transient and persistent data.
Information • Example: customer profile, transaction history,
content, and documents
• Bounding: Size and amount of data

27 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cloud best practices: Scalability

 Architect for elasticity
 Use an elastic platform to scale services and data
 Isolate functions to scale them separately
 Implement a cloud bursting strategy (like Farmville)
 Automate scaling to quickly scale-up and down


Agenda

 Massive scale
 Cloud economics
 Recommendations


ROI in the cloud can be significant

 How much upfront investment can you save by paying for only what you
use?
– 1. Calculate TCO for infrastructure to support peak usage
– 2. Determine high and low usage requirements weekly or monthly
– 3. This is a lease versus buy calculation, so you‟ll need financial help to
calculate net present value (NPV)
– 4. Enhance calculation by including any operational costs and savings and
upfront development work to run in the cloud

 What is the value of fast, continuous change (aka time-to-market)
– 1. Calculate the cost of being wildly desirable but being unable to scale fast
enough to serve customers
– 2. Calculate the impact of competitors

Ask your CFO to
perform a lease/buy
analysis.

Eliminate single point of
failure to achieve high
availability.

Monitor and diagnose
to fix the inevitable.

Eliminate bottlenecks to
achieve breakneck
performance.

Use caching and other
strategies to mitigate
bottlenecks

Design applications
and data for elasticity

Auto-scale to
maximize cloud ROI
33 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thank you

Mike Gualtieri
mgualtieri@forrester.com
Twitter: mgualtieri

www.forrester.com

© 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

“ROI in the Cloud – Myth, Magic, or Measureable?”
February 24, 2011

Imad Mouline - Compuware CTO, APM Solutions

Agenda

• ROI goals of moving to the cloud
– Business and technical objectives
– Compuware Gomez case study
• What we found
– Performance impacts ROI
– Cloud isn’t as simple as it seems
• How we solved those problems
– Optimization techniques
– Learned best practices

Web Applications Are Moving To The Cloud –
February 2011
Percentage of web app transactions that include at least one
object hosted on Amazon EC2 or Azure
Amazon EC2 Region Percentage
EC2 Asia Pacific - Singapore 0.185
EC2 US West - Northern California 3.460
EC2 EU - Ireland 5.286
EC2 US East - Northern Virginia 35.289
Azure AppFabric Region Percentage
Azure US South Central 8.669
Azure US North Central 4.389
Azure EU North 3.313
Azure EU West 0.062
Azure Asia Southeast 0.483
Azure Asia East 0.020

Part 1: ROI Goals of Going to Cloud

Best Practice: Define your goals and build a plan
Align goals across your organization If only there was a
button to push!
Why are we moving to the cloud?

Common goals include:
1. Trade CapEx for OpEx – can we just pay for just what we use?
2. Additional Capacity – How much capacity
do we need during normal and peak times?
3. Improved End-User Experience – What performance goals
are we trying to deliver against?
4. Greater Elasticity – How quickly can the provider we select
ramp up to meet our needs?
5. Flexible Bursting – How fast do we need to be able to access
additional capacity?

Case Study: Gomez Load Testing Network
• Our Goals
– Provide as much load as possible to test infrastructure/app
– Reduce overall costs to us
– Scalability (handle as many customers -- big & small -- as possible)
– Response time consistency

• Our challenge: Handling huge, unpredictable variations in demand

2 enterprises Options:
100K+ users
1M+ pages

5 enterprises
10K+ users
100K+ pages

• Our Goals

Plan for peak for 100% of time
100K+ users
1M+ pages 1) Build massive data centers with
frequently under-used capacity

5 enterprises
10K+ users
100K+ pages

• Our Goals

Plan for peak for 100% of time
100K+ users

2) Use “co-lo” facilities with
5 enterprises frequently under-used capacity
10K+ users
100K+ pages

• Our Goals


100K+ users

2) Use “co-lo” facilities with
5 enterprises frequently under-used capacity
10K+ users
100K+ pages 3) Use the cloud and just pay for
what we need, when we need it

Our approach: Use the cloud
Simulate hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, or
millions of page views per hour by leveraging Gomez‟
network of public Cloud data centers

Easily create load tests
leveraging a global
network of cloud
datacenters

Run load tests with real IE and FF
browsers or choose from over 500
mobile devices

What we found:
Cloud Performance is a business issue …

Poor Performance = Missed ROI

What we found:
The Cloud Creates Availability and Performance Concerns
• The Cloud is opaque, shared and elastic
– Loss of visibility and control - traditional tools don’t apply
– It’s complex, multi-source and variable
– Others can affect my performance
– Capacity issues and inconsistent bursting capabilities

Geographic Latency – West Coast Provider
• Response time for sample transaction of reference application hosted on
Amazon EC2 US West (California), as measured from major US cities

Geographic Latency – East Coast Provider
• Response time for sample transaction of reference application hosted on
Amazon EC2 US East (Virginia), as measured from major US cities

What we found:
Cloud performance is highly variable
• Average response time of reference app transaction across various Cloud providers,
measured from several global locations

It’s not all about network latency

Part 3: How we solved those problems

A quick recap on Forrester’s recommendations …

Our major concerns:

• Will we have all the
capacity needed when our
customers demand it?

• Are we in the right places
to provide a consistent
service our customers?

Addressing Our Concerns: Cloud Vendor Criteria
• Criteria
– Additional Capacity and Diversity of High Volume Locations
– Network of Cloud based Data Centers
• Generate enough load to test any customer site
• From enough locations to meet the needs of our global customer base

• Key Requirements:
1. API Based – to support self-service scheduling of tests for our
customers
2. Elastic Capacity – spin up servers when needed with our load
agent already installed and ready to go
3. Hourly Pricing – pay only for the capacity we use
4. Location Diversity – have cloud locations in new geographies
or in areas for heavy use
5. Capacity – have enough elastic capacity for the number of
customers we have and volume of concurrent load tests

Our solution: Use Multiple Cloud Providers

• Multiple providers
• Multiple regions Asia/Pac
• Multiple availability zones

Europe
North America

Our solution: Use Multiple Cloud Providers and
our own Last Mile Network
Simulate hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, or
millions of page views per hour by leveraging Gomez‟
network of public Cloud data centers and Last Mile Peers

Easily create load tests
leveraging a global
network of cloud
datacenters

Include peers from
dozens of countries to
gain insight into end user
experience under load
Run load tests with real IE and FF
browsers or choose from over 500
mobile devices

Pricing in the Cloud can be confusing
And it can cost you more than necessary

• Some vendors charge by
• CPU hour or RAM hour or both

• They all charge for bandwidth / transfer
• Some are free inbound, some aren't
• Some charge by volume, some by bandwidth

• Only the developer really knows
• How the application works
• What types of resources it requires

Build your applications or select a Cloud vendor with an eye
on optimizing their performance / cost ratio.

The Cloud Offers Unique Opportunities For
Optimization
• Domain sharding is a common performance optimization
• In traditional hosting environment, it came at a price
• The Cloud, with proper planning, can provide sharding for free

Potential bottleneck

Bucket
1

Bucket
2

The Cloud Offers Unique Opportunities For
Optimization
• Better performance, for little work, at no extra cost?

49 % Response Time Improvement
$0 additional cost
No reduction in capacity

Best Practice: Performance Testing Cloud Capabilities

Evaluate vendors based on your goals…
Capacity
• Test vendors to 15-20% past estimated capacity goals
Elasticity
• Baseline end-user performance before & after testing
• Test during pre-deployment and in production
• Ramp elasticity testing to peak levels
Burstability
• Isolate the cloud elements from other
infrastructure to test
• Test the “failover process”

Summary

ROI in the Cloud is real and it’s measurable

Be aware of the unique characteristics of the cloud

Architect your applications to leverage cloud characteristics

Consider usage pricing when designing your applications

Be paranoid about availability, performance and scalability.

www.compuware.com
Thank You! www.cloudsleuth.net

Q&ASend questions via „chat‟

Additional Resources

Available for download via WebEx http://www.sdtimes.com/link/34844

Being a good developer in the cloud era


ROI In The Cloud – Myth, Magic, or Measurable

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ROI In The Cloud – Myth, Magic, or Measurable