Operational Best Practices in the Cloud

Editor's Notes

• #6: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #7: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #9: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #10: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #11: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #13: More specifically, we hear the following challenges: (Again, use this to unearth where they are having challenges.) Limited resources – In almost every phase, limited hardware poses problems. In architecting new systems there are rarely enough resources to experiment with alternative architectures or new technologies. For developers, limited resources usually means sharing hardware for testing. Testers rarely have enough hardware or time to do all the testing they would like to do - full performance and load testing, testing on complete production architectures, or testing disaster recovery scenarios. And, delays in development often puts pressure on testers to do their work faster to still reach the same deadline. The inability to spin-up additional testing resources at these times causes quality to suffer. The result is that errors are found later in the cycle where they are more expensive to fix. Limited equipment also means staff are constantly provisioning, tearing down, and re-provisioning the same equipment. It takes time, and if environments are not completely wiped clean, additional errors are potentially introduced. Time to procure and provision equipment - As the load on IT departments increases and the release cycles shorten, the wait for equipment to be procured and provisioned takes time away from valuable work. One customer stated it took 3-5 weeks to procure and provision new hardware. Maintaining consistent environments – As code moves through development, test, staging and production, changes to configurations in one stage rarely make it back into earlier stages. As new code is implemented from environments that haven’t been updated, the same errors are re-introduced. Maintaining multiple environments – As if maintaining one consistent environment across many servers isn’t hard enough, most software requires testing on several different types of configurations – different versions of stacks, for different end user environments – one for each possible production scenario. For example, a software company may need to test their software on different operating systems or alongside various software packages. Most companies need to clone production environments to debug problems without impacting the current users.Whether it happens in development or QA - maintaining & reproducing environments is a time consuming task. If the task is distributed across multiple administrators, the coordination of changes made becomes challenging. If the task is consolidated under one administrator, there is a limit to the number of different environments s/he can reliably maintain.Distributed teams or team members – add collaboration requirements and exacerbate all of the issues mentioned.
• #14: With RightScale it’s easy to create consistent, reproducible configurations in each stage. In a typical development lifecycle, the systems architect creates a reference architecture that serves as a model for production, and then that architecture specifies what components are needed in each configuration.
• #15: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #16: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #17: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #18: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #20: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #21: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #24: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #26: RightScale'sServerTemplates allow you to capture best practices for provisioning and automating cloud infrastructure.  In this breakout session, we will explore how you can leverage the RightScale platform to share ServerTemplates with others.  Specifically, we'll walk through the steps to share and update ServerTemplates across your organization.  We'll also show you how to publish ServerTemplates publicly for the whole world to use.  This topic is best for: IT members who are responsible for maintaining server configurations within the organization, developers who would like to share work product within their group or ISVs wishing to reach cloud users by publishing through RightScale.
• #27: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #28: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #30: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #31: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #32: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #33: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers
• #35: The cluster monitoring is very powerful in that it provides different types of views into the operation of large clusters of servers