Lessons learned for large-scale apps running in a hybrid cloud environment: Intuit’s journeyDana Quinn – Director, App Ops

May 28, 2015

MISSION:To improve our customers’ financial lives so profoundly…they can’t imagine going back to the old way

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WORLD’S MOST ADMIRED COMPANIES

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$3B 2/3

Intuit in the Cloud

What workloads can you move to the cloud?

Choose a cloud-native toolset over a hybrid toolset

Don’t treat your cloud footprint like it’s your legacy data center

Watch your spending!

Lessons Learned

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• Speed innovation in service of solving customer problems!

• Enable our product development teams to move quickly

• Not directly solving for hosting costs, but added benefit

Why Intuit Chose to Move Workloads to Cloud

What workloads are good to start with?

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• Build environments

• Load test generation

• “Decoupled” systems

• Non-production environments

Workload Choice

Cloud-native or hybrid toolsets?

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• We feel choosing cloud-native toolsets is the best option

• Avoid things that add friction on the cloud side

• Cloud-native toolsets give the most access to your cloud capabilities

• The people we hire increasingly have cloud-native skills

Hybrid: Attractive from an Engineering Mindset, but …

What about cloud vendor lock-in?

Don’t treat your cloud like your data center

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• Don’t bring legacy management patterns into your cloud environments

• Insist on right patterns as you move to cloud!

• You’ll track new metrics – average instance age (keep low), utilization

• Anti-patterns to watch for when moving from legacy

• Challenge yourself to realize these patterns from the start

Don’t Make Your Cloud Feel Like Fog

Watch your spending

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Track Your Costs!

• Public cloud allows elastic use of resources

– You can save $$

– You can also waste $$ if your engineers aren’t used to tracking their spending

– Remember to “shut the cloud off”

• Empower teams to manage their own spending

– New mindset – but part of enabling small teams

– Make sure to keep enough central oversight on run rate

Don’t Let This Happen to You

Intuit’s results

Our Wins (and a Few Bumps)

• Workloads moved to cloud have blossomed!

• Small teams are successful at getting new products out quickly

• Elastic capabilities help us make our hosting dollars go further

– Load test generation usage up quite a bit

– Emerging pattern of on-demand dev environment creation and automatic environment shutoff after a period of time

Additional Intuit Content at Velocity

• 10 Tips for Your Journey to the Public Cloud

– Suchi Upadhyayula, Director of Product Development, Mint.com

– Sean McCluskey, Director of Quality and Operations, Mint.com

– Thursday, 2:40pm–3:20pm, Ballroom F

• Systems Thinking – Patterns for Scaling Unstable Systems

– Siddharth Ram, Chief Architect, Intuit Small Business Group

– Friday, 1:45pm–2:25pm, Ballroom F

• Stop by booth 301 in the Exhibit Hall!

Thank you!