The presentation was done by Liam Hogan, Director of BPM Development at Metastorm / Opentext, at Ciklum London Seminar "ISV & The Cloud: The CTO's Perspective"
2. Why Cloud?
Cloud is a major focus within OpenText
Supports rapid delivery of vertical solutions
Opportunity to engage with out customers
Many customers expect “on-cloud” as an option
3. What‟s driving customer demand?
Minimize infrastructure concerns
Quick start-up (no hardware / software provisioning) –
all this is handled by the host.
Low up-front cost
Easier disaster recovery and storage management
Elastic Computing (pay for what you need only when
you need it)
Global Distribution, Geolocation and Cacheing
5. Our initial cloud offerings?
A SAAS platform delivering pre-packaged BPM
solutions on Windows Azure
Operated by OpenText
Initially Single Tenant
Load Balanced / Redundant infrastructure
6. What might follow?
A PAAS environment for customers/partners to run up
and manage in the Cloud (single tenant only)
Multi-Tenant (for shrink wrapped „low touch‟ solutions
with low cost of sale)
Automatic Elastic Computing support (driven by
application instrumentation)
7. Business Challenges for ISV‟s
New disruptive business model (ISV -> Service Provider)
New operating model for Customer Support (Operations)
SAAS -> PAAS (if a business case can be made to
support the investment required)
Billing (how to charge customers to cover variable costs
and still be competitive)
Defining a Service Level Agreement (which aggregates
SLA‟s from the services you rely upon)
8. Cloud Disadvantages
Perceived lack of control of application environment –
particularly where sensitive data (health, banking) is
concerned.
Someone else worries about OS patches, but
application testing is still our responsibility.
Higher Costs
Internet Latency
Application adaptations are required
10. Azure components we use
Compute: Single Role Type – Web Role
Storage: Azure Blob Storage – Installation and Process Attachments
SQL Azure: BPM System, SBW System, BPM Process Data
11. Maximising ROI
Optimise Performance – to minimise the number of
Azure instances needed
Add support for auto scaling (when system detects it is
under load)
Operate in Multi-Tenant mode (if possible)
Minimise chattiness between components
Understand the characteristics of your application (and
charges incurred) – e.g data storage requirements.
13. Sweet Spot for Cloud Applications
Off the shelf „light touch‟ software applications requiring
little or no modification (with low cost of sale)
Self-contained applications with limited (or no)
dependence on on-premise data / systems
Self-contained enterprise applications supporting large
numbers of distributed users
14. Moving MBPM onto Azure
Automated cloud application deployment (for
Development Purposes) from build server
Scripts to auto deploy platform and provision new role
into live environment using Azure Services
Management API
Removed reliance on MS Distributed Transaction Co-
ordinator (DTC) – any complex roll-back of distributed
transactions must be written in custom code.
Changed storage of large images and documents from
Database (SQL Server) storage to local BLOB storage
Abstract any application functions that require file
system access to use Azure Storage.
15. Other Adaptations
Add support for service management and monitoring
Add support for auto scaling (based on load, or based
on calendar events / marketing initiatives)
Add multi-tenant capabilities (if your applications serves
as a platform and requires user isolation and data
separation)
SQL Azure does not support CLR stored procedures
(for good reason) – use standard (non .NET) stored
procedures instead.
Management of configuration settings (Azure Config) –
setting changes are rolled out without having to re-
provision all role instances
16. Summary
Opportunities
Opens new revenue streams
Closer relationship with customers
Competitive advantage
Challenges
Technical
Operational
Business
Notes de l'éditeur
The Metastorm BPM team is one team of many who are working on Cloud initiatives within OpenText.Cloud supports rapid delivery of vertical solutionsCloud presents a oppertunity to engage with out customers
Data sharding
Deploy process
Cloud is an investmentPAAS has challenges where the platform is highly open and extensible
Application Changes – changes to support the Cloud Platform + changes to allow easier deployment and management.
Windows Azure fabric abstracts andmanages physical and virtual machines– taking care of provisioningWindows Azure services provide additional capabilities your cloud applications can make use of (SQL Server, Identity Management, Azure Storage, Appfabric, Business Intelligence Services, Distributed Cacheing, Content Delivery Network)Automatic OS and service patching, redundancy.
Compute – we host the BPM process runtime (engine) in a Web Role and have the ability to scale to meet user load (transactions per second).Storage – By default large files are stored in Windows Azure Storage (leveraging availability, scalability and low cost)SQL Azure – Azure handles availability and scalability for us.
Changed ourapplication to use Azure Blob Storage. Add support for archiving (moving from DB Storage to Blob/File storage, and maybe to on premise storage).
MS will only support 2 instances
There is no such thing as file system storage
It is possible to end up with one single code base supporting both on premise and Cloud deployments