Migrating Applications to the Cloud

1. Migrating Applications to the Cloud
IT Summit 2014
June 5, 2014 Thursday 11:25AM-12:15PM Emerson Hall - 105

2. Agenda
• Introduction to “Migrating Applications to the Cloud”
• Sharing our experiences
• Lessons learned

3. Introduction
Presenters
• Magnus Bjorkman, Technical Manager, Identity and Access Management
Program
• Carolyn Brzezinski, Technical Lead, Student Information System Program
• Greg Freiter, Software Development Manager, Identity and Access
Management Program
• Rob Parrott, Senior Architect, CTO Office

4. Introduction to “Migrating
Applications to the Cloud”

5. IT Challenges
● Infrastructure cost: doing more with less
● Infrastructure cost: enabling engineering and best
practices
● Bringing services to market quickly
● Reducing operational overhead
● Adapting to rapidly changing technology landscape
● Growing expectations of performance and availability
Cloud platforms are designed to solve these challenges ...

6. Why go to the Cloud?
Fast and Flexible High Quality
Low Cost
24x7
Fault Tolerance / High Availability

7. Paradigm shift is needed to fully leverage the cloud
• You give them a name
• You have a few
• You care for them when they are sick
VS
• You don’t give them names
• You have many
• There is always more cattle

8. Sharing our experiences

9. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Applications currently in production in the cloud
• Harvard Connections
• App Portal that handles PIN Registration
Application Architecture Overview
• Standard Web based applications and services running in a Java Tomcat
environment
• Java applications for moving of data
• LDAP/AD/Oracle Database for data storage
Target Scope for Cloud
• Migration of all custom applications

10. ● Fast and Flexible - Keep away from Pet mentality - API enables us to Automate Everything, Lose Nothing
● Lower Cost - Cost savings by keeping Production running and deploying the environment in DEV and Test as
needed
● Agile Process - Make it “good enough” and iterate over it again and again
First Deployment: Connections Architecture
Supplied by: Evgeny Platonov

11. Second Deployment: App Portal
● Higher Quality - Evolved from existing automation which fosters Consistency and Reliability (Higher
Quality)
● Highly Available with cloud components such as Load Balancer and Auto Scaling as well as S3. As
you can see we have not taken full advantage.
● Lower Cost - Auto Scaling to save Cost and Flexibility with resources such as VMs.

12. Student Information System and AWS
Applications currently at AWS
• Oracle Campus Solutions (CS) Sandbox
• Oracle Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) demo application
• OBIEE demo with scrubbed Harvard data
• UPK (User Productivity Toolkit)
Target Scope for AWS
• All Campus Solutions VMs

13. Considerations for Moving a Packaged, Enterprise
Application to AWS
Functionality
• Will the Campus Solutions application work when deployed to AWS?
• How will OBIEE connect to the Exalytics servers that physically reside at 60 Oxford Street?
Performance
• How does an environment deployed to AWS handle under load?
High availability
• What options are available to ensure the availability of the application on AWS?
Flexibility/scalability
• How dynamically can the application be scaled on AWS?
Support
• Will you be supporting the AWS environments with an internal team or 60 Oxford Street
resources.

14. Campus Solutions Scaling Strategy
● Fast and Flexible with Auto Scaling to accommodate seasonal load.
● Highly Available with Servers located in different Amazon regions, loadbalancer and Auto Scaling. DR
supported in-house rather than by a third party.
● Lower Cost - No need provision, maintain and pay for servers that are only needed to support
seasonal load.

15. HPAC: Harvard Web Sites
• Includes www.harvard.edu, news.harvard.edu, campaign.harvard.edu
(Drupal & Wordpress app platforms)
• Goals:
• Better performance:
• Handle arbitrary spikes in traffic, in particular from noteworthy
events and DDOS attacks
• Uptime
• Fault-tolerant architecture
• Release management
• Transition to more rapid release cycles
• Move from legacy hosting platform
• Automate release cycles
• Cost reduction over Rackspace hosting

16. HPAC: Harvard Web Sites
Highly Scalable
“Caching” layer
Web App Tier:
Read-only
Performance & Availability: use of a cache layer that’s highly scalable provides incredible
performance at cheaper cost.
Testing indicates: 70x performance boost even before using CDN, with cost reduction of 25-65%.

17. SEAS: Datacenter VPC
Goals
• Minimize costs
• Capital costs of equipment and datacenter within SEAS
• Operational overhead of on-site infrastructure
• High cost of HUIT colocation
• Opportunity for rapid adoption and migration to cloud
• Self-governance
• Appropriate level of isolation from Harvard-central services and
networks
• Control over own services and assets, but tied to larger HUIT
environment

18. SEAS: Datacenter VPC
SEAS Managed
Environment
HUIT Central
Environment
AWS enables significant cost reduction and fast
migration compared to on-campus alternatives.

19. Lessons learned

20. How do you manage all this? - People, Definitions and Version
Control
Developers
Network
Admin
Sys Admin
Database
Admin
VS
Infrastructure
as Code (e.g.
CF JSON and
Puppet MF)
Cloud
Infrastructure
Engineer or
DevOps
Cloud Provider Tools and
Change Control Tools
Developers
Collaboration

21. Service OperationService Design/Engineering
SME Consultation
(Infrastructure/AWS)
Service
Transition
Management and Monitoring
Product Team
Architect
Cloud
Infrastructure
Engineer
Developers
Release
Engineer
Infrastructure
Definitions (e.g. CF JSON
and Puppet MF)
Application Packages
DevOps
Operational
Configurations
Management
and Monitoring
System
QA
Security
Specialist
CI Tests
Stage
Architecture and
Standards
Production
Ops Engineer/Support
Environments created
as needed and one
environment per user
Management and Monitoring
System Product
Management and Monitoring Product Team
Network
Specialist
Sys Admin
Specialist
Database
Specialist
Management
Application
Packages
Management
and Monitoring
System
Transition
Manager
Technical
Writer
Dev
Identity and Access Management
Active and
Collaborative
CI Server
(Jenkins)
How do you manage all this? - Service and Release EcoSystem
Application
Code

22. Data Movement in the Cloud
For batch execution and scalable
reliable, fault tolerant data movement,
use FTP approaches (including S3) and
message queues
VPN useful primarily for
application migration, legacy
apps, and low latency network
connectivity. However, not
scalable.
IAM team started with VPN access, but is
developing alternative approaches

23. Services Needed for Cloud
As applications are migrated to cloud, need to bring along
operational services to support them, or develop new such
services.
• Logging and analysis (Splunk in the cloud)
• Instrumentation and monitoring dashboards
• Bastion and administrative access
• Harvard IAM -> Cloud IAM integration
• Package management and updates
• Resiliency Testing (Chaos Monkey, Simian Army)
• Application Testing and Release Tools

24. Lessons Learned
• Application Requirements Differ. Some applications will be easier to
deploy to the cloud than others, and some applications will be able to take
advantage of the benefits of the cloud more so than others.
• Move Incrementally. Do not try to move everything at once. Move things
incrementally and improve your management of the cloud incrementally.
• Cultural Change is Difficult. Switching from Kittens to Cattle is hard. We
have to train ourselves in throwing away environments frequently and
rebuild constantly. The process of doing this is a big part in what makes our
management of the environment better.
• You Own It!! The cloud provider will only provide service to a specific point
with a very clear delineation. Everything else is up to you.
• High Effort. It takes a long time to build this correctly.
• High Reuse. When you have built it correctly, you can leverage it over and
over again.

25. Epilogue: Cloud & HUIT

26. Cloud Services at HUIT Today
● Access to Amazon Web Services under
Enterprise Agreement
● Direct billing to your 33-digit code
● Volume discounts
● Onsite training opportunities
● Support
○ Access to Solution Architect &
Rapid Adoption resources
○ Upcoming Enterprise-level support
● HUIT Private Cloud Pilot
● On-premise complement to AWS
● Aimed at DevOps workloads
● Due for availability at the end of June
http://cloud.huit.harvard.edu/

27. Cloud at HUIT Tomorrow
Challenge: Cloud democratizes IT, but
enterprises need standards and some
level of governance.
Challenge: Cloud requires a significantly
different set of skills and approaches
Challenge: Organizational readiness.
HUIT has formed a Cloud & DevOps Working Group charged with
developing an ambitious HUIT strategy – to be delivered at the
beginning of July – for meeting the challenges of cloud & devops
adoption.

28. Questions

29. Appendix

30. Supporting documentations for questions