Who is RightScale? What do they do? How was working in a cloud start-up company?

1. Whistle-Stop Tour of RightScaleAli Khajeh-Hosseini

2. The cloud comp kool-aid Cloud computing is f***ing awesome It’s easy It’s cheap It’s scalable It cooks you breakfast and takes the dog for a walk

3. Employee starts work on system Used personal credit card to create AWS account Because of minimal cost, employee didn’t get authorization for expenses, and plans on submitting it on their expense report Didn’t notify IT of project as it’s a breeze to manage Didn’t meet with corporate security for a system review prior to architecting and building deployment Used AWS best-practices such as AMI’s, RDS, Autoscaling… Employee didn’t document the process All credentials, keys and AMI info are in an excel file on desktop Didn’t consider risk or instability of AWS, or architect across regions Deployment is done and ready, but not TESTED Employee launches system into production (YES!!!)

4. Forecast…

6. Company has no visibility or control over the account or running servers

7. No documentation is available to dive deeper

8. All critical information resides on the person’s laptopNeed a management platform for the cloud

9. Overview Who is RightScale? What do they do? How was it? (working in a cloud startup)

10. RightScale Founded in 2006, based in Santa Barbara, CA Management platform for IaaS clouds AWS, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack (private clouds)… 160 people and growing $45M VC funding

11. Large Scale Every day: 60,000 servers are monitored 35,000 alerts are triggered 20,000 escalation emails are sent to users 9TB of data is exchanged with our serves

13. RightScale Platform

14. Cloud Market Place Basic components needed for a system Templates, scripts, images, macros Server Templates (over 40,000 customer templates) MySQL, DB2, Apache, IIS, PHP, Rails, ASPX, LAMP Server Templates Machine images don’t work well (too monolithic, big, static and opaque) boot any server from a small set of very generic images and configure the server dynamically at boot time

16. Servers ServerTemplate+ instance in the cloud Can be cloned, terminated, rebooted...

19. Deployments Group of servers, arrays and other cloud resources High-level overview of: costs, status, audit entries, inputs…

20. The mother of all cloud APIs volumes volume_attachments volume_snapshots server_templates tags multi_cloud_images multi_cloud_image_settings

21. Multi-Cloud API Works with all RS-supported clouds Users <–> RightScale <–> Clouds Follows REST paradigm JSON/XML responses, filters and views

22. RightScale Platform Provide users with a single dashboard and API that can be used to manage all of their resources on different clouds.

23. Working at RightScale Company culture Technology overview Projects I worked on Tools I used

24. Company culture Feels like a startup Informal – no dress code, adhoc procedures Dedicated, young, passionate people Very dynamic, agile – flat organization Be prepared to do something then scrap it

25. We like to eat Monday lunches Tuesday bagels Release night dinner Morning-after-release pastries Lunch gang Spoilt for choice

26. Big events Release Dinner at 6pm Start release procedure at 8pm All systems are taken offline at 9pm All systems are put back online at 10pm We stay up until 2am fire fighting RightScale Employee Meetup (REM) Every four months in Santa Barbara One week of brainstorming, tutorials, food, drinking and music A few honest customers giving feedback 20 lightning talks

27. Technology overview Around 50 code repositories Ruby, and Ruby on Rails MySQL and Cassandra Wide range of projects Back-end services Front-end web apps Mobile apps Systems and scripting Automated testing

28. Projects I worked on White team ServerTemplate testing and VirtualMonkey Green team New signup flow (buy online) API client Multi-cloud API Yellow team Automation Multi-cloud API Major refactoring of core services …

29. Tools Ditched Windows Design: Wiki page + emails/comments Code: Ruby, Rails IDE: RubyMine Source control: Git Testing: RSpec, FlexMock, CI, AWS Skype: always on

30. Summary RightScale is currently the most advanced management platform for clouds Working there has been amazing Get a free account and manage your cloud resources Free premium accounts for universities, email me. ali@rightscale.com