3. http://www.coord.org
The Cloud is DEAD
• Amazon Outage Ironically Raises the Public Cloud Doubts
• On April 21st, 2011, Amazon made the
worst outage in the cloud’s history
• A networking glitch made its storage volumes
automatically create back-ups of themselves,
filling up storage capacity and causing
connectivity issues, lasts two days
• The affected sites could not help waiting
for just Amazon’s repairs
• Q&A site Quora posted “Sorry – it sucks for us
too. We’d point fingers, …”
• News aggregator Reddit posted “We are still
waiting on Amazon to get to our volumes”
• Location service Foursquare, and SCVNGR
posted “The sky is falling! Amazon’s cloud
seems to be down (raining?)”
4. http://www.coord.org
The Cloud is just a Tool
• How SmugMug Survived the Amazon Cloud Failure
• All of services in Amazon were spread across multiple AZs
• They just launched another identical ELB(Elastic Load Balancer), point it at the
non-affected zones, and updated their DNS
• Note that ELB was affected by the EBS outage
• Like RDS, ELBs would be also constructed on EC2 instances with EBS volumes ??!
• The services were designed for failure
• Fortunately, they didn’t use EBS, which was the main problem for
Amazon crashes
• Since EBS didn’t guarantee predictable performance, they didn’t use RDS running
on it.
• As a result, the exact types of data that would have potentially been disabled by
the EBS meltdown don’t actually live at Amazon at all
• Note that it all still lives in their own datacenters, where they can provide
predictable performance
5. http://www.coord.org
A Better Alternative is Hybrid Cloud
• Zynga Makes Dramatic Shift From Public Cloud
• Zynga has moved most of its users away from Amazon and onto its
private cloud, called zCloud, to maximize the reliability and performance
of its social games network
• Zynga started out hosting games on its own servers in a collocation facility but
moved to Amazon when it couldn’t keep pace with demand
• A turning point was the 2009 launch of “Farmville,” which shot form zero to 10
million users in six weeks
• But from early 2011, Zynga launched all its new games in their own cloud only
when demand became predictable
• zCloud was built on top of CloudStack and RightScale
• Nearly 80 percent of Zynga’s daily active users were hosted on its own
infrastructure at the end of 2011, while 80 percent were hosted in Amazon at
the start of 2011
• Zynga now sees Amazon as a way to deal with unexpected surges in
demand rather than as its primary platform
6. http://www.coord.org
Public Players are headed for Hybrid Cloud
• “The hybrid cloud is a little bit like sex
in high school” – Michael Crandell
• Everybody is talking about it, but not
everybody is doing it – except us
Michael Crandell, RightScale
• “RightScale is a little bit like a parasite in Amazon”
8. http://www.coord.org
Auto-Scaling in Hybrid Cloud
Register with LB’s:
• Using SSH
Private Cloud • Using RightNet Public Cloud
• Central repo
CPU
Scale Up
LB LB Scale Down
App App … App Public Internet App App … App
ServerArray
Master Slave
Security: Contact DB:
• Access Control • Using DNS / IP
• Encryption • Executing a script
9. http://www.coord.org
Disaster Recovery in Hybrid Cloud
Private Cloud Public Cloud
CPU
Scale Up
Scale Down
LB LB
App App … App Public Internet App App … App
ServerArray
snap
snap
snap
snap Master Slave snap
snap
snap
snap
snap
snap
Slave snap
snap
S3/Cloudfiles
• Global storage
• Live replication + rsync
• NoSQL
11. http://www.coord.org
Application Virtualization in Hybrid Cloud
• Why Application Virtualization?
• Extreme Simplicity – copy and run
• VM doesn’t solve the app/OS problem
• VM images tie OS and apps together forever and must be
managed as a whole
• Separate app and OS images to reduce permutations
• Adapting VM images for migration among differing
infrastructures is difficult
• App & OS patches done once – gold “images”
• Simple copy for archive, release, DR, replication