Planning and Cloud Design -

Basics
INFO-5112
Things are Changing…

 The “Old way” of thinking and design focused on fixed, rigid, and static models
 Scale up (if insufficient resources)
 Monolithic (single product, housed in a single place)
 Stateful (everything was a fixed application that ran
constantly, designed for offline applications)
 Fixed capacity (no way to be elastic or proactive
unless you allocated beforehand)
 Focused on Active/Passive DR (Disaster Recovery)
and perimeter security
 Costs were fixed and constant (hardware, software)

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The “New way” of doing things

 The Cloud model focuses on designing dynamic

Cloud-Aligned architectures
 Scale out (not up)
 Distributed (not monolithic, spread out in different
locations, geographical or otherwise)
 Stateless (single-sessions, applications are initialized at
runtime or user request, means that they don’t need
to be kept as active resource consumers)
 Elastic and flexible resource allocation
 DR (Disaster recovery) is always active, never an
afterthought
 Costs are on an pay-per-use basis
 We shift CAPEX to OPEX (Capital to Operational expenditures)

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Where do we start?

 Cloud design is a matter of planning

 Careful decisions shape your cloud
migration strategy, applications you
convert, and essentially your whole
strategy

 You work from BIG to LITTLE

 Look at the macro problem so that you can
invent a solution to meet the needs of the
business first
 Planning determines the outcome
 Success or failure are determined by your
plan and execution
 You must understand the needs http://cerasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/best-business-blogs.jpg
Were not to start

 Clouds are not the be-all end-all of a business plan

 Don’t throw money or technology at your solution first.
Doing so will cause you to try to iterate yourself out of it,
which will lead to failure
 Don’t start at the LITTLE, working to the BIG
 Doing so will lead you to redundancy and solutions that
are not a best fit
 You are looking for a solution that will fit your whole
business plan, not a solution that meets only individual
goals
 The solution should not be thought of, or designed as heterogeneous
 Prioritizing According to Business Drivers

 Increasing productivity
 Reducing time to market in new product
development
 Reducing production costs
 Optimizing product distribution and delivery
 Increasing market share
 Increasing customer retention

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing (Dan Sullivan)

 Outcomes of positive design decisions

 Successful implementation of a cloud solution

 Selection of best service and deployment model
 Aligning business values with actions (solution-to-business
plan)
 Further reduced CAPEX and potentially reduced
OPEX
 Cloud solutions work on shifting CAPEX to OPEX for a
better service to consumers
 Cloud operations provide better services because of
the original saving in the CAPEX area
 Lower TCO (total cost of ownership) due to careful planning and delivery
 Better stability

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 Outcomes of bad design decisions

 A solution that doesn’t make sense

 Fragmented
 Unnecessary
 Overcomplicated
 Higher incurred costs
 Costs that could be shifted to OPEX
 Less stable
 Less reliable
 Waste of time and resources
 Possibly affecting your reputation

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 Key outcomes of planning

 Understand your business

 Understand your requirements
 Learn how to make your solution
revolve around your requirements,
not the other way around
 The business plan to move forward with

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 Things to keep in mind

 Things get real complicated, really quickly

 Architecture, planning, key decisions,
when mapped get complicated when
you have enough of them
 A system consists of many small bits
of architecture and plans, like a puzzle
 Understand your own solution first
 You need to know how your solution fits in
 Now to manage it and how to scale it

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 PLANNING YOUR CLOUD
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STRATEGY
 A business case

 Why do we need a business case?

 Should we even migrate to the cloud
 Does our company benefit from a cloud solution
 What will it accomplish
 Weigh the pros and cons

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 Example of a Business Case

 Three positive financial aspects of cloud:

 Greater cost agility with infrastructure as a service — Cloud services have a high degree of cost variability, so expenses
can quickly go down if demand for services is reduced.
 Increased retained cash — By using cloud/on-demand services, CIOs do not have to invest upfront to buy IT
infrastructure via regular refresh cycles.
 Reduced opportunity costs — Opportunity costs are defined as the value foregone by pursuing a certain course of action.
By choosing to use cloud/on-demand, a company can free up cash to invest in other parts of the business.
 Three negative financial aspects of cloud solutions: 
 Less cost agility with software as a service (SaaS) — SaaS providers are promising cost agility as one of the benefits; in
reality, however, this is only working one way — up. Clients can end up paying more if they use more licenses, but not
less if they don’t use as many.
 Higher subscription fees — The total cost of ownership may be lower over five years, but the subscription fees are more
than the perpetual licenses after year three or four; therefore, the savings need to be significant and ongoing to make cost
lower after more than five to seven years.
 High switching costs with SaaS — The cost to get data out and bring it back on-premises is high.
Source: http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/the-financial-case-for-moving-to-the-cloud/
Your requirements

 Always determine your requirements

 You can’t design a cloud solution if you don’t know what you are looking for
 You need end-to-end visibility in your organization
 Determine what to move
 Require the input and assistance of subject matter experts and your C-level personnel
 Requirements can be
 Software
 Hardware
 Security
 Compliance
 Personal preference
 Requirement Categories

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing (Dan Sullivan)

 Requirement Categories

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing (Dan Sullivan)

 Requirement Categories

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing (Dan Sullivan)

Additional Requirements

 Using cloud storage to store single copies of data that are accessed by multiple applications rather than
duplicating data sets
 Reducing the number of ad hoc reporting tools as users standardized on the “best of the breed” tools offered
in the cloud’s service catalog
 New applications, such as statistical analysis and data mining of large customer transaction data sets enabled
by on‐demand access to compute and storage resources
 Step 3 – See what’s out there (or in here)

 Research cloud vendors (CSPs), brokers (CSBs)

 Weigh pros and cons
 Compare with your requirements
 Determine best or…
 Maybe roll your own cloud
 Carefully do your research to determine the best solution
 Look at things from different angles

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 Example of the market

Published Sep 6, 2019

To be continued…

 Next Week’s Agenda:

 Continuing cloud planning and design
 Quiz 3