Cloud hosting your ePortfolioPresented by Catalyst IT

THE HYPE

➔ Burn all your IT equipment➔ Let go your IT staf➔ Save money➔ Increase flexibility

THE FEAR

● Slow● Complex● Privacy concerns● Losing control● Expensive

The reality is somewhere in between

● Need to adapt to a diferent way of doing things● The complexity has moved

– Further abstracted from the real world● Costs need to be watched

– (Don't forget that double XL instance you left running)

– (And that 20TB of disk)● Diversity and resilience in deployment

– It's gonna break in a odd way, plan for it in a way that will suit your organisation

Adapting

● It's not going to be easy if you try to transpose your existing infrastructure to cloud hosting. Consider what is on ofer:– Load balancers

– Databases

– Network Security

– Backups

The Providers (Examples)

● Amazon– Widest, but also most complex ofering

● Microsoft Azure– Was once geared towards Windows

● Rackspace– Morphing from one type of provider to another

● Google– Thanks for the price war

● Catalyst and other OpenStack providers– Obviously the best

Hedonistic IT

● “Pets” vs “Cattle”● Live for today! For we shall die at 7PM!

– Infrastructure wasted 50% of the time

– Maybe you have no idea of the popularity?

– Scale down between semesters● Diversity and resilience in deployment● Maybe now you can scale horizontally

– One Mahara per dept/school?● Maybe Mahara institutions don't cut it

– New opportunities for on-billing

1st Corny Section Break Slide

A Higgs Boson walks into a church, the priest says “Sorry, we don't allow

bosons in here”

THE DANGER - It's real

● Cloud hosting is terrifying● Can't see internals

– Powerlessness when it stops working (And why?!)● Unexpected new challenges

– Rate limiting on all sorts of annoying things● Disk access (Ie. Per operation)● Network throughput / New connections● CPU usage (Watch the %steal)● Instance start rates● Email sending rate

Safe Harbour - Schrems Vs. Facebook

● US government and companies have access to data in a way considered unlawful in the EU– So storing data concerning European citizens in the

US probably illegal

– We all knew it was unsafe, now a court says so

– Probably the lowest risk is use a provider in your country

– No legal compulsion for correction or erasure in the USA

– NSA etc able to legally creep on your data in the USA

THE DANGER – Continues!

● It's still shared hosting, and the performance can be variable– You are efected by your neighbors; further increasing

your powerlessness● Burnt by crappy VPS providers in the past● SLAs are pretty open ended, the most you are going to

get back is the money you are putting in

THE DANGER – … never ends!

● To the big guys, you are probably a minnow– Expect to get treated as such

– (But I bet all are looking for a coup in the education market)

● Skill loss– How networks/firewalls actually work

– Install a database

– Manage storage● Scare people

– “We've moved it too the cloud”

2nd Corny Section Break

The Boson replies, “but without me, you cannot have mass!”

THE GOOD PARTS – Begin!

● Free your valuable system administrators to administer– Save time dealing with hardware vendors

● Impossible diagnostic tools– Frequently Redhat (Or worse, Windows) only

● Impossible staf at $HARDWARE_VENDOR– Upgrade the BIOS/IMM/$RANDOM_FIRMWARE– “Not running Windows/RedHat? We can't help..”

● Expensive maintenance contracts– They seldom show up within the agreed time anyway,

and make a weasely excuse (See above)– And you probably feel like you never use it

THE GOOD PARTS – Continue

● Not wasting time / having 0 lead time on hardware frees you to– Try new things

– Do and practise upgrades

– Load testing● Not having own hosting means

– No need for proximity to hardware (Sysadmins can stay at home and not engage in hygiene!)

– Swap CapEx for OpEx

– The vendors are serious about hosting, maybe you have trouble convincing others to be serious?

THE GOOD PARTS – ad nauseam

● Invest time in resiliency, not redundancy● Save the planet (Maybe)

– Cloud providers do more with every watt than you can do

● No more room of that junk because 'maybe we need it'● Impress people

– “We've moved it to the cloud!”● Performance now very good, definitely good enough for

ePortfolios

More good bits

● Much of choice in providers● Freedom to go to another

– Don't have justify investment in hardware● Maybe go 'half-way' and use a containerisation provider?

– Maybe talk to me about Docker

No one actually works like this

IN SUMMARY

● Generally suited to Mahara– Load balancers

– Cloud DB

– Scale up for busy times

– Huge increase in flexibility● Except damn NFS!

● Cloud hosting is not for everyone– You still need skilled people to make it work for you

● It's not the same as outsourcing your Mahara– Some new challenges to replace old ones