Clearing the Clouds Understanding cloud computing

1. Clearing the Clouds Understanding cloud computing Ali Khajeh-Hosseini St AndrewS Cloud Computing Co-laboratorY

2. Cloud computing • There are many definitions and they all differ • Simply put, cloud computing is a model for delivering IT as a Service. Clouds refer to the actual data centres that house the hardware and software • US National Institute of Standards and Technology working definition: Cloud computing has • Five characteristics • Three service models • Four deployment models Clearing the clouds, November 2009

3. Characteristics Clearing the clouds, November 2009 On-demand self-service: you can start using computing resources at anytime without needing human interaction with cloud service providers. Computing resources can be storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, VMs... Broad network access: you can access those resources over the network using laptops, mobiles phones etc. Resource pooling: the computing resources are shared by multiple users (multi-tenancy) Rapid elasticity: you can scale up or down the amount of resources that you’re using very quickly Measured service: resource usage is metered by measuring your storage, CPU hours, bandwidth usage etc.

4. Service Models Clearing the clouds, November 2009 • Infrastructure as a Service • Low level of abstraction, most flexible, dealing with virtual machines • Platform as a Service • High level of abstraction, less flexibility, dealing with your application code and your provider’s APIs • Software as a Service • Using software that others have developed and offer as a service over the web

5. Deployment Models Clearing the clouds, November 2009 Private cloud: controlled and used by one organization Community cloud: used by several organizations Public cloud: available to the general public Hybrid cloud: mixture of the above, allows cloud bursting

6. StACC Clearing the clouds, November 2009 • St Andrews Cloud Computing Co-laboratory launched in April 09 • Local investment of about £0.5 million covering • PhD Studentships • Experimental hardware platform • Technical support • Our aim was to explore the research potential of CC bringing together researchers in distributed systems, high-performance computing and systems engineering

7. StACC Experimental Cloud • The StACC private cloud is now operational • 10 servers (Cloud controller, storage server, 8 * 4 core general purpose servers) • Running Eucalyptus open source software • Objectives • To understand what’s involved in setting up and running a cloud (more than you might think!) • To provide an experimental platform that we can measure • To provide us with a platform that we can extend (and break) Clearing the clouds, November 2009

8. Cloud Service Consumers Is it cheaper? Is it secure? How will it effect my work? Software as a Service Platform as a Service Infrastructure as a Service Private Clouds Public Clouds Community Clouds Hybrid Clouds Clearing the clouds, November 2009 We did an extensive literature survey to see if we can find out the answers...

9. Costs E. Walker, The Real Cost of a CPU Hour, 2009 • Should I lease or buy? • Walker modelled the cost of a CPU hour when purchased as part of a server cluster and compared it with Amazon EC2 • 2 scenarios, purchasing: • a 60,000 core HPC cluster • a compute blade rack consisting of 176 cores • Model showed that it’s cheaper to buy in both scenarios assuming that CPU utilization is very high and electricity is cheap • Good first step but far too narrow in scope, what about costs of housing the infrastructure, installation and maintenance, staff, storage and networking? Clearing the clouds, November 2009

10. Costs E. Deelman, G. Singh, M. Livny, B. Berriman, J. Good, The cost of doing science on the cloud: the Montage example, 2008 Deelman et al. used simulation to calculate the cost of running a data-intensive astronomy application on Amazon’s cloud Highlighted the potentials of using cloud computing as a cost-effective deployment option for data-intensive scientific application Assumed the cost of running instances on AWS EC2 are calculated on a dollar-per-CPU-second basis, i.e. they normalised the costs But, AWS charge on a dollar-per-CPU-hour basis and charge for a full hour even for partial hours. So launching 100 instances for 5 minutes would cost 100 CPU hours Makes a significant difference in costs Clearing the clouds, November 2009

11. Costs D. Kondo, B. Javadi, P. Malecot, F. Cappello, D. P. Anderson, Cost-benefit analysis of Cloud Computing versus desktop grids, 2009 Kondo et al. investigated the costs of using cloud computing for desktop grid projects such as SETI@Home They found that deploying the servers used for the SETI@Home project on Amazon’s cloud would cost 40% less than using their university’s data centre Didn’t include upfront server purchasing costs or staff costs Cloud computing would look even more attractive if they did Clearing the clouds, November 2009

12. Costs Clearing the clouds, November 2009 So is it really cheaper? Not really sure, it all depends on the specific scenario and what you include in your calculations We’re developing a tool to help users decide for themselves...

13. Security Clearing the clouds, November 2009 Security concerns are often mentioned in cloud computing but not much research has been done to address them The Cloud Security Alliance has published a set of security guidelines in the form of problem statements and issues that need to be considered by users Most concerns are about loss of control over physical hardware which then lead on to legal issues...

14. Legal Issues * P. T. Jaeger, J. Lin, J. M. Grimes, S. N. Simmons, Where is the cloud? Geography, economics, environment, and jurisdiction in cloud computing, 2009 Most legal issues are related to the cloud’s physical location, which determine its jurisdiction Amazon have data centres in 2 regions (US and Europe) so they can deal with these issues But the cloud’s nature means that users don’t know (or care) about this information: “it’s all in the cloud” Location is important because cloud computing increases the control of governments and corporations over resources*. Cloud computing brings together vast amounts of data and computing resources in centralised data centres, compared to how they are currently hosted in geographically dispersed locations It’s unlikely that these jurisdiction issues will stop the use of cloud services Clearing the clouds, November 2009

15. Effects on Work * R. Yanosky, From Users to Choosers: The Cloud and the Changing Shape of Enterprise Authority, 2008 How will cloud computing effect the work of IT departments? Their authority has been diminishing over the last few decades, from mainframes to PCs Cloud computing is going to decrease their authority further Users are turning into “choosers”* who can replace the services provided by the IT department with service offered in the cloud Clearing the clouds, November 2009

16. Case Study Clearing the clouds, November 2009 To study these issues, we performed a case study examining the relative costs of migrating from a locally provided host to a host provided on Amazon The system studied was a fairly small data acquisition IT system from the Oil & Gas industry. The system had a contract value of £104,000 and was deployed in a local data centre Our focus was socio-technical – what are the human and organisational issues that influence such decisions

17. Case Study Clearing the clouds, November 2009

18. Case Study • Infrastructure costs over 5 years • Around 55% cheaper • 218 support calls over 5 years • 20% of them would be eliminated • Backup, power and network issues would be Amazon’s responsibility Support Issue Clearing the clouds, November 2009

19. Interviews Clearing the clouds, November 2009 • We took these findings and presented them to various people in the company and interviewed them • Technical manager: • It looks attractive • We would lose leverage over support contracts • Concerned about security and protection of virtual machines • Some corporations veto data going over port 80 • Support staff: • Very negative about cloud computing • Feel threatened • Don’t want to lose control over hardware

20. Interviews • Project manager: • Hard to sell this idea, there’s no data centre to show clients • Difficult to alter corporate security policies • Easier to manage cash flow • Reduces required skill-set and overheads • Business development manager: • We are under pressure to reduce electricity usage • It presents new opportunities for us, e.g. running training courses in the cloud Clearing the clouds, November 2009

21. Decision Support System Clearing the clouds, November 2009 Cloud computing has sparked a huge interest in the IT industry Many organizations are thinking about migrating their systems to the cloud. During this period, many migration decisions need to be made, what to keep in-house, what to migrate These aren’t simple decisions and there are a range of issues that need to be considered when making these decisions: economic, technical, organizational, risks etc. We are developing a decision support system to help people make those decisions…

22. Summary Clearing the clouds, November 2009 Cloud computing is still in its early days We are currently at the start of a transition period, the shift towards cloud computing could take many years Not much research has been done about issues effecting cloud service consumers