Professor Ian Sommerville from The University of St Andrews discusses the Cloud Adoption Toolkit that his team has developed

1. The Cloud Adoption Toolkit
Prof. Ian Sommerville
JISC meeting, December 2011 St Andrews Cloud Computing Co-laboratory Slide 1

2. Cloud Adoption
Our aim is to support decision makers thinking
about migrating systems to a public cloud platform
How much might it cost?
How should I price my services?
What are the risks/benefits?
How will it affect my organisation?
Will it save energy?
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 2

3. Scope
• Medium-scale enterprises
that currently run most
services in-house
• Tens to hundreds of
servers
• Incremental service
migration to cloud, where
services are provided on
dedicated infrastructure
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 3

4. Not just a technical problem
• Concerns from staff about
how the move will affect their
jobs
• Concerns from users over
„loss of control‟ over „their‟
systems
• Concerns from IT
management about
maintaining their
organisational influence
• Concerns (real and
JISC meeting, December 2011 misplaced) about Slide 4

5. Cloud adoption toolkit
• Infrastructure cost
modelling
• Energy modelling
• Risk and benefit analysis
• Stakeholder impact
analysis
• Service pricing
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 5

6. Cost modelling
• Cost modellers are
provided by major
cloud providers
• Simplistic usage
assumptions
• Difficult to do „what
if‟ calculations
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 6

7. Our requirements
• Cost modelling
and comparison
for different
providers
• Variable usage
patterns
• Simple „what if‟
analysis
• Infrastructure
model to allow
comparison with
JISC meeting, December 2011 in-house Slide 7

8. Stand-alone prototype implemented
and tested with several case-studies
Now developing web-based system
JISC meeting, December 2011 8 Slide 8

9. Supported clouds
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 9

10. Patterns
• If you simply need a service that runs all the time with
a predictable, steady workload, you will not save
money by moving this infrastructure to the cloud
• Cost savings from the cloud come when you have a
variable workload and you provision your
infrastructure to cope with periods of higher demand
• Patterns are a key feature of our tool that allow
fluctuating demand to be modelled
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 10

11. JISC meeting, December 2011 11 Slide 11

12. JISC meeting, December 2011 12 Slide 12

13. Infrastructure description
• Analysis is based on an XML model of
infrastructure AND the applications deployed to
that infrastructure
• Very hard to predict overall infrastructure loading
• Easier to predict service/application use
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 13

14. JISC meeting, December 2011 14 Slide 14

15. JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 15

16. Socio-technical analysis
• Its not all about money
• Intended to assess risks and
benefits of migrating
systems to the cloud
• Allows complex stakeholder
relationships to be
considered and the impacts
on these stakeholders
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 16

17. JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 17

18. Case studies
Oil & Gas IT Company
• A Khajeh-Hosseini, D Greenwood, I Sommerville, "Cloud Migration: A Case Study of
Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS," 2010 IEEE 3rd Int. Conf. on Cloud
Computing
• D Greenwood, I Sommerville, "Responsibility Modelling for Identifying Sociotechnical
Threats to the Dependability of Coalitions-of-Systems", 2011 Sixth IEEE Int. Conf. on
SoS Engineering
CS School in St Andrews
• A Khajeh-Hosseini, D Greenwood, J W Smith, and I Sommerville, 2011, "The Cloud
Adoption Toolkit: supporting cloud adoption decisions in the enterprise." Software:
Practice and Experience. Special Issue on Software Architectures and Application
Development Environments for Cloud Computing, January 2011
Large media corporation and CiteSeerX
• A Khajeh-Hosseini, I Sommerville, J Bogaerts, P Teregowda. 2011. Decision Support
Tools for Cloud Migration in the Enterprise. IEEE 4th Int. Conf. on Cloud Computing
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 18

19. Service pricing
• New addition to toolkit intended
• Addresses the key question for service providers
“How much should I charge for a service and what
revenue can I expect”
• Price setting and revenue simulations
• How much will it cost to provision infrastructure for
provided services
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 19

20. System status
• Stand-alone prototype developed and tested in a
number of case studies
• Now being re-implemented as a web-based service
• Initial version scheduled for release around end-
February 2012
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 20

21. Summary
• To understand the real costs of cloud usage, you
need to understand and model how your applications
and infrastructure are used
• Our cloud modelling toolkit allows more realistic cost
simulations than the tools provided by cloud providers
• Socio-technical issues (threats, risks, benefits) are
usually more significant in decision making than cost-
savings
• Our toolkit is unique in integrating cost and socio-
technical analysis
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 21

22. Thanks
• The development
team
• Ali Khajeh Hosseini
• Derek Wang
• James Smith
• David Greenwood
JISC meeting, December 2011 Slide 22