Organisations today are increasingly looking for faster and cost effective ways to develop and test products before deployment. Those managing this process must determine when a product is ready to be deployed to production. But before this decision is made, the entire testing and development process should be carefully planned, managed, and reviewed. Amazon Web Services' utility computing model provides a great backbone to achieve this goal. With AWS you can spin up infrastructure on an as-needed basis for development and testing. Run workloads for a certain amount of time, and then stop running them – and stop paying for them – when you don’t.

1. AWS Government, Education, &
Nonprofits Symposium
Canberra, Australia | May 20, 2014
Test and Development on AWS
John Hildebrandt
Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services
Ryan Rowley
Architecture and Strategy
Shared Service Centre
Department of Education, Department of Employment

2. Some Challenges Customers Tell Us About
Managing multiple environments
is tough
Experimentation is slow
Obtaining servers takes weeks

3. How The AWS Cloud Can Be Useful
Simplify management of
multiple environments
Adopt new development
practices
Obtaining Servers in minutes

4. Development
&
test
in
the
cloud
Preserve it for future reference
Take lots of it when you need it Throw it away when you don’t
Unlimited elastic capacity Cost optimization
Durable imaging & storage

5. Extend on-premise environments…

6. with Amazon VPC…

7. Populate as demand dictates…

8. Connect over dedicated links…

9. And turn it off when you are done

10. Spinning
up
environments
in
a
way
that
suits
you
Do
it
yourself
CloudForma2on
Beanstalk
AMIs, snapshots,
bootstrapping
Using core AWS features to
set up an environment to
meet your needs
Use console or enact through
simple scripting
Declaratively
defined to your
requirements
Take full control of complex
environments using Cloud
Formation template language
Generate environment
specifications as you build
software
Managed standard
containers
Give development & test
environments to developers
direct from IDEs
Configure containers to meet
your needs through
properties

11. AMIs, snapshots, bootstrapping
Custom
building block
Generic image

12. Quickly
deploy
and
manage
apps
in
AWS…
Beanstalk
…into
a
range
of
containers

13. The
benefit
of
templated
environments
Template
Declara2ve
defini2on
Define
what
not
how
Known
configura2on
Store
stack
configura@on
in
source
control.
Same
template
for
Dev,
Test,
Prod.
Template
for
DR.
Parameter
driven
Dynamic
and
user-­‐driven
templates
Collabora2on
Share
templates
with
ease
as
just
files
CloudForma2on

14. Create
environments
to
support
specific
test
types
Tes3ng
at
scale
Unit
&
regression
Scale up and parallel run unit
and regression plans in a
fraction of the time
Load
&
performance
Utilize spot market for
generating load and test how
applications perform with auto-
scaling
A/B
Run A/B scenario testing with
replica stacks
Security
Create sandboxes for
aggressive security testing

15. Dispose
for
cost
op@miza@on,
but
preserve
cri@cal
configura@ons
Disposable
environments
can
be
recreated
AMIs
Create a catalog of AMIs for
each iteration of an
application
Stored in S3
Templates
Source control infrastructure
templates with every
application version
Snapshots
Save disk images with
‘frozen’ data sets and attach
to instances when needed
Roll
back
and
recreate
an
environment
for
any
given
applica3on
version

16. www.ssc.gov.au
Shared Services Centre and
Amazon Web Services
Ryan Rowley
Architecture and Strategy
Shared Service Centre
Department of Education, Department of Employment

17. Shared Services Centre and
Amazon Web Services
• The SSC’s Current Development Environment
• The business requirements
• How cloud meets this need
• SSC integration with AWS
• Automation and Orchestration
• Benefits
• The Future and AWS integration

18. Current Development
Environment
• Providing services for 600 developers
• Servers used mainly during business hours
• Around 400 internally hosted servers
• Majority of Development servers don’t contain any form
of sensitive data
• Virtual servers hosted across 4 hyper v clusters
• 40 TB of SAN storage used for Development virtual
servers

19. Our Requirement
• Reduce the cost of providing in house
development services.
• Make the server provisioning process more
efficient for SSC and Developers.
• Keep end user access to AWS console to
minimum.
• Build on our strengths - use products and
expertise that exist within the Department.

20. How cloud meets our
requirement
• Reduced cost
• Pay for infrastructure as and when you need it
• No requirement to maintain underlying host
• Technology alignment and integration
– VPC being able to work with our Active directory,
SCOM etc.
• Security

21. How we achieved this
• Environment Overview
• Products Used
• Automated server provisioning in AWS
• Changes to internal process
• Hurdles

22. Development Environment

23. Products used
• System Centre Orchestrator 2012 R2
– Remote PowerShell
– Microsoft SharePoint
– Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft PowerShell
• AWS API Command Line Tools
• Microsoft InfoPath

24. Automation and AWS

25. Server Request Form and
Automation Video
(Play Videos)

26. Server Request Form and
Automation Video
(Play Videos)

27. Changes to internal process
• Power off servers after hours
• Lock down available server options
– Provide three specifications of servers
• Type 1: 2 CPU, 4GB Ram
• Type 2: 2 CPU, 8GB Ram
• Type 3: 4 CPU, 16GB Ram
– Tie server specifications to Roles
• Application
• Database
• Management
• Create new server naming standard
• Record server reservation data
• Use of Metadata to track servers and inform billing

28. Hurdles
• Changing the perception of cloud
• Lack of information available due to early
adoption
• Not being able to use existing server
deployment process
• No server 2012 R2 operating system available

29. Benefits
• Technology alignment and integration – VPC
enables easy integration into existing infrastructure
management products – AD, SCOM, SCCM etc
• Cost – roughly 50 percent reduction over 5 years
• Rapid infrastructure provisioning
• Reduced server deployment time to 20 minutes
• Readily available backup and restoration – S3
• Automation and repeatability
• Future opportunities - i.e.
the
ability
to
instan3ate
a
large
number
of
servers
to
mimic
load
on
an
applica3on
and
then
destroy
these
servers
a=er
use.

30. Future
Development
Pre-Production
Production

31. THANK YOU
Please give us your feedback by filling out the Feedback Forms
AWS Government, Education, &
Nonprofits Symposium
Canberra, Australia | May 20, 2014