17 March 2010

QCon London 2010 - Cloud Computing

Cloud computing and virtualization was a popular topic at QCon London 2010.

Background/primer/proposition:
  • Cloud marketing suggests that hardware and/or systems administration is now a commodity that you shouldn't have to think about too much and can safely outsource. 
  • Just like TDD (Test Driven Development) decreases the need for QA, CI (Continuous Integration) with direct deployments into an operational environment will decrease the need for systems administration.
  • Outsourced pay-as-you-use cloud propositions will likely cause costs to switch from capex to opex to budget for computing capacity (was traditionally HW and SW in capex)
  • Grossly simplifying, there are four interesting cloud propositions available:
    • In-house hardware virtualization - cloud under your control, in your data centre (e.g., VMware, Xen, Solaris Zones)
    • Outsourced hardware virtualization (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service) - cloud as an "infinite capacity" of generic computing and you define the systems from the OS up (e.g., Amazon's AWS EC3)
    • Outsource compute capacity (PaaS - Platform as a Service) - cloud as a place to deploy software components into a fairly tightly defined (constrained) operating environment (e.g., Google's App Engine)
    • Pure services (SaaS - Software as a Service) - cloud as a source of "commoditized" services to be used when you construct an application (e.g., Google's web analytics, Facebook OAuth API for user credential management, AWS's S3 for storage)
  • Cloud means that you can cost effectively create and delete computing resources as needed for parts of your IT environment that don't require regular use.  For example testing and in particular load testing.
  • Non-tech business types get excited by cloud because:
    • If your an entrepreneur type, you get bonus points for running your infrastructure from the cloud when looking for funding (more-so in the last two years, this is declining some now)
    • Finance and P&L owners get exited any time they can commoditize something to drive down costs.  Tech has mixed feels about this as "drive down costs" tends to imply redundancies.
    • Easier to justify upfront costs for a new business case if you only pay for what you use (a failure is easy to delete, no sunk capex expenditures)
  • Both tech and non-tech types get excited about not having to generate a lot of paperwork then wait for authorizations and shipping times to get new kit.  Assuming company bureaucracy doesn't shackle down cloud controls too vigorously, a new virtual platform can made available very quickly and at low costs.
  • If you can maximize utilization of HW you buy, then it's no different than buying cloud resources (likely cheaper)
General Observations on Cloud and Virtualization

Virtualization enables us to achieve that solutions architecture ideal of "one box one purpose", it just that it's become "one virtual box one purpose".

Virtualization enables us to take applications that don't have a good threading model to take advantage of boxes with many cores and use up all the cores (application per VM; VMs added until all cores are utilized)

Cloud does imply a lack of control over your core infrastructure.  Do you need this control?

The cloud is still just a bunch of hardware systems in a data centre.  There is no magic.  Their DC and systems admins will have their share of problems as well.  If the cloud sysadmins can provide more uptime than your own techops can provide at a similar cost point, the argument for cloud increases.

Similarly, there is debate over how good the SLAs are for cloud.  But really, how enforceable are the SLAs you have anyway?

Your choice of virtualization or cloud will enforce a way of creating applications and handling services.  You may not like it.  Conversely, it may force you to be disciplined in a new way otherwise missing when you create applications.

You will make an investment to learn the systems and make your applications work in the cloud environment.  This will cost and create some lock-in.  This is more true for PaaS than IaaS.

The cloud is being used to "long tail" a number of services.  Service "particles" are appearing you can use to provide an aspect of functionality in your overall solution.  The more of these partners you use that are in the same cloud with you, the greater the efficiencies and hence lower costs.  Combined with first mover advantage and vendor lock-ins, this is a network effect that should drive toward having just a few cloud suppliers in a few years.

Relating Cloud to Internet Gambling Business

The use of an in-house cloud like VMWare makes good sense.  We're regularly adding in new products that need to undergo development and test yet we don't need permanent capacity to service these requirements.  While a VMWare setup can't fully proxy a production environment (unless you use VMWare in production as well), it is very suitable for most types of functional verification other than load and low level device compatibility.

Being able to hand the keys over to a set of virtualized servers enables more entrepreneurial behavior.  For example, if you have a larger business that has a heavy layer of process, you can still work effectively with start-up partners.  Give them the keys to their own set of systems and they can do whatever they want with them without impacting your core systems.  At which time they're proven successful, their revenue stream can justify improved risk management.

Handling flash crowds with cloud probably isn't possible for our industry today.  In-house clouds don't really handle flash crowds (Why not just have the capacity there anyway? What do you want to cripple to support that big marketing campaign?).  Outsourced cloud generally isn't possible as the bigger cloud providers may not allow internet gambling to be run within their clouds (AWS restriction anyway; and yes, this will likely ease up at some point, just look at Akamai's behavior on Internet Gambling).  Also a CDN (Content Distribution network; an SaaS of a sorts) will take care of a lot of the flash crowd load we experience.

Using an outsourced cloud PaaS for data analytics doesn't seem likely.  Data analytics crunching benefits from close proximity to the data set being crunched.  Bandwidth to upload big data sets into the cloud from higher connectivity costs locations (lots of internet gambling in offshore locations with expensive ISP costs) doesn't make sense.

SaaS however is quite interesting.  Services like Google Analytics that enable almost real-time data analysis are clearly the way to go for an Internet gambling site.  Highly bespoke business analytics will likely stay inside the business or use a SaaS for commodity analytics.  

Depending on who you ask, the following may be real risks or just FUD:
  • Taxation - as services are sourced from someplace other than the tax advantaged place you have your business in, you are at risk of emerging taxation implications
  • Centralized point for governments to enforce legal compliance.  By hosting in the cloud (which is actually going to be one or more physical data centres), you've given the governments that have oversight of those data centres a good choke point to use against you.  They could use taxation, inappropriate content, or services not in compliance with regulation.
Conclusion

Virtualization makes complete sense for Internet gambling companies, all the way from development through to production.  That's not news, most in our sector have been using virtualization for a few years now.

On Cloud/IaaS provisions, AWS (a clear IaaS market leader) have flatly disallowed any internet gambling related operations inside their service.  While it is likely you could get away with internal use (dev, test) of cloud in these services, do you want to create a dependency and then have it suddenly shut off on you?  AWS of course isn't the only show in town for IaaS  There are other providers -  you would have to evaluate them versus related risk factors and re-development costs to integrate their use into your environment.

There is no clear use yet of Cloud/PaaS for standard Internet gambling products.

There are plenty of emergent opportunities to use Cloud/SaaS for Internet gambling.

(Index of emergent technologies applied to Internet Gambling)

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