We used Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service to dramatically speed-up Pret a Manger’s PeopleSoft implementation. It improved our access requirements, reduced infrastructure costs and gave us access to more powerful servers and greater resilience than we’d otherwise have been able to afford. I’ll walk you through the initial decision, explain how everything was set up and demonstrate the benefits delivered to the project. I’ll also describe other occasions where the flexibility of Amazon EC2 has been invaluable.

1. PeopleSoft Conference 2011 Case Study: How using 'The Cloud' accelerated Pret's PeopleSoft project Duncan Davies CTO - Succeed Page 1

2. Introduction Who am I? My name is Duncan Davies, I’m a long-time PeopleSoft techie with a passion for sharing information and building a knowledgeable community. I blog at www.PeopleSoftTipster.com. Who are Succeed? Succeed are an established specialist PeopleSoft consultancy that specialises in full project lifecycle implementations of large HCM, CRM, Time and Attendance, Payroll, and Financials applications for large blue chip companies. Over the last 11 years we’ve grown to around 60 people, two thirds of whom are permanent staff, and mostly having more than 5 years experience with PeopleSoft. Our teams are currently working across 10 different client sites.

3. Introduction Who are Pret? Pret a Manger are a privately owned British food retailer. Their unique selling point is: “proper sandwiches avoiding the obscure chemicals, additives and preservatives common to so much of the 'prepared' and 'fast' food on the market today.” They have just under 300 stores and are growing by about 10%/year. They are incredibly focused on staff wellbeing and happiness.

5. Profile Management

6. Career Planning

7. Succession Planning

8. Recruitment

9. Health & Safety

10. Global Payroll

11. Absence Management

12. Disciplinary & Grievance

13. Training

14. BenefitsAgainst a backdrop of a company busily growing in lots of directions, and with an aggressive timeline. In summary, a lot of modules, quickly. We had to get up and running fast!

15. The Cloud – Terminology There is a lot of confusing terminology thrown around when trying to find a infrastructure provider: Hosting Private Cloud SaaS Public Cloud Multi-Tenancy OnDemand

16. The Cloud – A Primer In ‘The Cloud’ just means “outside of the customer’s datacentre.” The ‘Private Cloud’ is outsourcing management of your virtualised infrastructure to someone else, either on your premises or hosted in their proprietary data centre. Vendors in this area are Rackspace, IBM’s Hosting, Oracle OnDemand.

18. You no longer have to worry about data-centre security, backups, redundancy etc.

22. Far more flexibility (servers charged by the hour) Military grade security

23. Higher performance

24. Super fast provisioning

26. US West (Northern California),

27. EU (Ireland),

28. Asia Pacific (Singapore),

29. Asia Pacific (Tokyo).Within each region is at least 2 availability zones. Within each zone is at least one Data Centre. Oracle is also entering this market and currently has a Data Centre in the US – The Austin Data Center (ADC).

30. Huge infrastructure “Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com’s global infrastructure through the company’s first 5 years, when it was a $2.76 billion annual revenue enterprise,” AWS Engineer James Hamilton

31. Why Amazon AWS? Cedexis Survey

32. Cost

33. Instance Sizes Price includes Windows license. Prices are for Windows instances in Ireland/EU data-centre using exchange rate as of 20th June 2011 Hourly prices are ‘on-demand’ instances.

34. Ease of Administration

35. Controlling Instances How do I administer my instances? Firefox add-in ‘ElasticFox’. Instances can also be managed from the AWS web site.

36. Creating Instances Adding storage is just as easy.

37. Concerns

39. Control which IP Ranges have access

40. Virtual Private Cloud – site-to-site VPN

42. Oracle Support for Amazon Amazon and Oracle have announced that a wide selection of Oracle enterprise software has been certified to run on Amazon EC2. Customers who power their business with Oracle software can fully leverage … Amazon Web Services for production workloads with full support from Oracle and AWS. Oracle customers can use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees. A set of platform and application templates that customers can run as instances on Amazon are now available. These templates reduce implementation times from days to minutes.

43. Amazon at Pret

44. Amazon outage in April There was an Amazon outage in April where the entire Virginia region went down for a day. If this had happened in the EU zone our environments wouldn’t have been down (as we don’t use EBS). If we were running Production on AWS we’d consider going multi-region. The benefit of Amazon is this is a lot easier than if you owned the hardware yourself.

45. Use Cases Cost Effective Hosting Elastic Usage Short-term development resources

46. Thank you Thank you for your time. I’m happy to answer questions, either now or around the venue later. This presentation will be available from the Succeed and UKOUG Websites.