Panel: Cloud

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Panel: Cloud

Greg Knox

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Prashant Throughout

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#cloud-computing

#infrastructure-as-code

#ruby-on-rails

#devops

#heroku

Panel: Cloud

by Greg Knox, Prashant Throughout, Dr. Nic Williams, Jay Austin Ewing, and Jim Meyer

The video from the LoneStarRuby Conf 2013 features a panel discussion on cloud services, led by experts from various companies in the industry. The main theme revolves around the architecture, advantages, and challenges of different cloud platforms, notably focusing on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) solutions. The panelists include Dr. Nic Williams from Stark and Wayne, Greg Knox from Roku, Prashant Throughout from HP Cloud Services, Jay Austin Ewing from Engine Yard, and Jim Meyer from Rackspace.

Key Points Discussed:

- Panelist Introductions: Each speaker shares their role, their company’s focus, and the specific cloud services they represent.

- Use of Amazon EC2: The panel discusses the prevalence of Amazon EC2 in their infrastructures, with multiple hands raised indicating its widespread usage among participants.

- Service Architecture:

- Heroku has a multi-tenant architecture on Amazon, allowing for scalability and the handling of millions of applications efficiently.

- Engine Yard emphasizes its longstanding use of Amazon for its mature IaaS offerings and plans to integrate multi-cloud capabilities.

- Cloud Foundry shifted from vSphere to Amazon, citing cost efficiency and better platform stability.

- Advantages of PaaS:

- Platforms like Heroku and Engine Yard reduce the complexity of dealing with configurations for databases and application servers, enabling rapid application deployment.

- The panel highlights that a simplified deployment process allows developers to focus on innovation and market delivery rather than infrastructure management.

- Hybrid Cloud Solutions: The discussion touches on the customization capabilities of hybrid cloud models, which can cater to unique organizational needs like compliance and privacy.

- Customer Support: Rackspace’s commitment to customer support is noted, where a significant percentage of staffing is dedicated to ensuring user challenges are effectively managed.

- Importance of Infrastructure Control: The panel notes the significance of having insight into and control over the underlying architecture, as it leads to better optimizations and insights as organizations scale.

Conclusions and Takeaways:

- Organizations benefit from choosing the right orchestration strategy based on their specific needs and how much they wish to manage their environments.

- The evolution of cloud platforms continues to simplify processes for developers while providing robust solutions tailored to unique business requirements.

- The expert insights shared during the panel emphasize the importance of cloud services in facilitating development, addressing customer support, and optimizing infrastructures for modern applications.

00:00:15.240 We're going to start. Let's just introduce ourselves left to right. Please tell us your name, your role, and a little bit about your company.

00:00:23.039 Sure, my name is Greg Knox. I lead the technical account management team at Roku. What we do is work with a number of customers on their Roku platform to help them with architecture, scaling advice, and just about anything they need to be successful on the platform.

00:00:50.579 My name is Prashant Throughout. I'm with HP Cloud Services, where I run the sales engineering solution architecture team. HP Cloud is a public cloud offering based on OpenStack, providing a number of capabilities such as infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, making it a competitive alternative to Heroku and others.

00:01:16.380 I'm Dr. Nic Williams, and I run a consultancy called Stark and Wayne. We focus entirely on Cloud Foundry and encourage its adoption and usage. The goal is to assist organizations in integrating Cloud Foundry within their environment. It can run on HP, Amazon, any OpenStack environment, or vSphere.

00:02:03.899 My name is Jay Austin Ewing, and I am the field application engineer at Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a platform as a service that currently runs on Amazon EC2, though we are transitioning to other infrastructures. Essentially, you can deploy your code, and we bootstrap an entire singleton environment stack with Gentoo Linux as the OS, supporting Ruby, Node.js, and PHP.

00:02:38.700 I'm Jim Meyer, the VP of software development in the cloud products division at Rackspace. I have been involved in the Ruby community since about 2007. I'm excited to be on this panel, discussing the various platforms that we represent.

00:03:27.060 Can I see a show of hands? How many of you actually use Amazon EC2 as your infrastructure as a service?

00:03:53.040 Let's dive deeper into how we use Amazon and what infrastructure as a service means. Can each of you explain the architecture of your solutions individually? Why is that architecture better than others potentially?

00:04:06.750 Heroku is built entirely on Amazon. We operate in the U.S. East region, spanning most availability zones. Our infrastructure is multi-tenant, meaning when you deploy your code, you are doing so in a cloud that supports multiple applications simultaneously. The routing mesh operates on top of what we call our Dyno manifold. This architecture allows for incredible scalability, currently hosting around 2.5 to 3 million applications.

00:05:36.180 Engine Yard has been using Amazon EC2 for a long time because it was one of the most mature infrastructure-as-a-service solutions available. They also provide innovative new products catering to customer demand. We plan to incorporate multi-cloud capabilities and are currently working on integrating Windows Azure.

00:06:33.300 The pivotal people running Cloud Foundry moved from a vSphere-based data center to Amazon due to cost efficiency and platform stability. Committing to Amazon often leads to significant discounts on off-the-shelf pricing, providing great value versus running your own data center.

00:07:46.020 The strength of a platform as a service like Heroku or Engine Yard is that you don't have to become experts in configuring databases like PostgreSQL or application servers. They handle that for you, allowing quick and easy deployment of applications.

00:08:35.880 With the growth of apps at scale, the value of knowing how to optimize becomes essential, particularly when you're required to separate concerns in a complex application architecture. A platform as a service simplifies the process and allows you to focus on delivering ideas to the market.

00:09:48.000 Thus, with platforms like Heroku or Engine Yard, developers can automate many processes. Pre-configured stacks, like nginx and PostgreSQL, save time and effort, allowing teams to concentrate on what matters: application development.

00:10:49.740 Now, it’s about choosing your orchestration strategy, particularly in how much you want to care about the environments. The Cloud Foundry project earlier explored this very idea. There is value in providing insight and customization to your containers in the underlying architecture.

00:12:39.600 For example, many organizations have unique needs that may not be available in public clouds. The hybrid cloud model allows for tailored solutions for various scenarios, including compliance and privacy requirements.

00:12:49.739 Finally, it’s essential to look at the abstraction and visibility within the cloud. As we’re discussing open sourcing everything, the ability to control your infrastructure can lead to better insights and eventual optimizations.

00:13:50.600 Let’s also consider how you scale customer service in this context. For example, Rackspace employs about 40 percent of staff dedicated to customer support, ensuring user challenges are addressed. They provide not just a product but a fault-tolerant, trusted environment to foster development.

00:14:36.019 As we wrap this up, I want to express gratitude to our panelists for discussing their insights on cloud services. It's been an informative session.

LoneStarRuby Conf 2013