Download - Eduserv and the Cloud Who we are, what we do, what you can do… Matt Johnson

Eduserv and the Cloud Who we are, what we do, what you can do Matt Johnson

Topics Eduservs Community Cloud Short history of Eduserv Journey to the Cloud Building a Cloud platform Build your own Cloud-based eco-system Questions welcome at any time!

Short History of Eduserv

A history of Eduserv in 3 slides (1/3) Started in 1988 as CHEST & NISS at University of Bath Licensing negotiation & gateway services (via Telnet) First UK academic web portal in 1994 Single sign-on service launched 1996

A History of Eduserv in 3 slides (2/3) Became the independent charity Eduserv in 1999 Core mission to promote the use of ICT in education Primary hosting provider for Department of Education Worked with Cabinet Office to implement UKonline

A History of Eduserv in 3 slides (3/3) Year on year growth since 2001 >3.5m registered users of Eduserv-based services Returned more than 5m in grants to academia New datacentre for education & the public sector

Eduserv in 2012 Stable, trusted provider of services to academia 127 staff (with around 5 further vacancies) turnover of 17.8m in 2010/11 Fully UK based, with no shareholder pressures Developing new products and services Next generation of Identity & Access Mgmt services Implementing Cloud services for education &government

Journey to the Cloud

Eduservs journey to the Cloud Research into public cloud services (early 2010) JISC FleSSR project (2010-2011) 30k grant, partnership with University of Oxford UMF Cloud pilot (2011-2012) 1.3m HEFCE funded project Eduserv Community Cloud Infrastructure (2012+) Delivering multiple cloud-based services for our customers

UMF Deliverables vCloud Compute (https://vcloud.cloud.eduserv.org.uk/)https://vcloud.cloud.eduserv.org.uk/ VMware-based (vSphere 5 + vCloud Director 1.5) Being used internally for education, government and 3 rd sector services Currently in beta (with 30+ HE/FE organisations) File Storage (https://storage.cloud.eduserv.org.uk/)https://storage.cloud.eduserv.org.uk/ Deliberately distinct from API-driven web storage (such as Amazon S3) Delivered using standard storage protocols Initially WebDAV SFTP, NFS and CIFS potential future protocols Launched in beta during July

What wasnt funded by UMF Multi-site deployments Currently services are based only in Swindon (but has been designed to work across multiple sites) Backups Pilot service places onus on customers for backups Commercial network connectivity Currently restricted to academic users only For lots of potential customers, these are show-stoppers

Next Step Community Cloud Infrastructure (CCI) CCI service will build on UMF to deliver Dual site capability (Swindon and Slough) DR functionality (automated site failover) Customer backups Documentation to support IL0-2 accreditation Scheduled to launch November 2012 Already have customers waiting to use the service

Building a Cloud platform

Design Goals Community Cloud, not Public Cloud Already lots of public cloud providers Need to differentiate on something other than scale Quality Built using premium components Capable of being redeployed for different architectures Security UK ownership and location (US PATRIOT Act concerns) Auditability of assets and processes

Hardware - Network Network requirements 10 Gbps end-to-end capability No single point of failure Scalability to >1,000 connected hosts *Lots* of VLAN partitioning Network choices Juniper SRX gateway for firewall / intrusion detection Cisco Nexus 7k for core switching Cisco Nexus 5k for distribution switching

Hardware - Compute Compute requirements Highly scalable (to >1,000 connected hosts) Memory density (limiting factor in virtualisation) Vmware & Microsoft HCL Compute choices Cisco Unified Compute System Blade-based infrastructure with 2 x CPUs, power management 192 GB per blade capable (using 8 GB DIMM) Diskless (for ease of management)

Hardware - Storage Storage requirements Highly scalable (multi-PB capable) Support for block and file-level storage Easy to manage / support Storage choices EMC Isilon Storage Cluster NFS / iSCSI node-based NAS platform Scalable to 14+ PB in a single namespace Mix-and-match different performance/capacity nodes High efficiency (90% usable space with N+2:1 protection)

Cloud Platform Cloud platform requirements Compatibility within Eduservs core markets (academic, government) Cost-effective to sell and support Cloud platform choices Initial support for Vmwares vCloud Director Builds on vSphere, highly used in the public / academic sector High levels of existing skills at Eduserv Complementary to public-cloud offers different types of functionality

Lots of things to think about Customer services DNS, DHCP, SMTP, AD, VPN, NTP, SSH, RDP Self service support v Managed services Management services Monitoring, Alerting, Reporting, Billing Orchestration, automation, backup, firewall, load-balancing, IDS Multi-site implementation Automated v manual failover capabilities Management plane resilience

Biggest challenges to Cloud Pricing model Getting the balance right between covering costs and remaining competitive Understanding average / peak usage, usage profiles, growth trends, etc Intrusion Detection / Prevention How much is the supplier responsible for customer services Balancing autonomy against a requirement to retain network whitelisting Requires different mind-set for architects Encouraging people think Cloud design, rather than Legacy design Doesnt often work with current generation of enterprise applications

Build your own Cloud eco-system

In less than 2 hours, you will have Generic email address with ActiveSync capabilities Fully manageable DNS with own domain name Personalised email address using own domain name Website / Intranet / Wiki / Document Management services Cloud compute, database, network and monitoring services Cloud storage and synchronisation between computers And all for the price of a domain registration (2.40 per year)

1. Register a (generic) email address Lots of free webmail services Using MS Outlook.com ActiveSync services Clean interface Time taken: 2 mins [email protected]

2. Register a domain name Lots of services Using 123-reg UK-based Cheap (2.39 for.info) Time taken 5 mins (to register) 5 mins (to configure) Up to 12 hours (to propagate)

3. Register for Name-server hosting Using Point SaaS DNS hosting UK-based service Free (for 5 domains) Time taken 5 mins (to register)

4. Configure NS records 123-reg control panel Use Point NS servers dns1.pointhq.com Point control panel Allocate domain name Auto-add Google Apps Time taken 5 mins (to configure) 2 hours (to propagate)

5. Check DNS configuration From command line Nslookup From the web DNS Stuff, Pingdom Check NS records MX records Time taken 1 min

6. Personalised Email ([email protected]) Fewer choices Google Apps MS Office365 Multi-step registration Register details Validate identity, DNS Configure Google App Services Time taken 30 mins

7. Google Apps Google Apps Familiar Gmail interface ActiveSync integration Powerful Drive integration Paid and free options Up to 10 users for free Time taken 30+ mins

8. Cloud IaaS, PaaS, SaaS Lots of cloud services Few offer free service Amazon Web Services Original & biggest cloud provider Free tier (for one year) Registration is straightforward Requires credit card Mobile validation Time taken 10 mins to register

9. Amazon Web Services Wide range of services EC2 - compute S3 - storage RDS / DynamoDB database SNS - notifications CloudWatch monitoring and lots more Well documented Check out the Kindle library

10. Microsoft WebSiteSpark MS Web Development Aimed at SMEs / individuals Free for 3 years Range of services Free licences (Visual Studio, etc) Free access to Azure PaaS Hosting support Time taken 15 mins to register

11. Cloud Storage & Synchronisation Hugely competitive Free tiers with bonus storage Inter-machine syncing Market leaders DropBox (2 GB) SugarSync (5 GB) Google Drive (5 GB) MS SkyDrive (7 GB) Time taken 5 mins to register

Other useful Cloud apps Pivotal Tracker Agile PM Google Analytics Web Analytics Wordpress.com Blogging Kindle reading (& docs) Pingdom web monitoring Evernote online notebook Pastie.org online clipboard TryStack.org OpenStack sandbox JotForm.com online web forms Moonfruit.com hosted CMS Heroku.com Ruby hosting

Useful Links MS Outlook: http://www.outlook.com/http://www.outlook.com/ Point DNS: http://www.pointhq.com/http://www.pointhq.com/ 123-Reg: http://www.123-reg.co.uk/http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ Google Apps: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.htmlhttp://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/freehttp://aws.amazon.com/free MS WebSiteSpark: http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/support.aspxhttp://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/support.aspx Dropbox: http://ww.dropbox.comhttp://ww.dropbox.com SugarSync: http://www.sugarsync.com/http://www.sugarsync.com/ Google Drive: http://drive.google.com/http://drive.google.com/ MS SkyDrive: http://skydrive.live.com/http://skydrive.live.com/

Where to find out more Education Cloud support site: http://support.cloud.eduserv.org.uk/ Website: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/hosting/cloud-computing/

Download - Eduserv and the Cloud Who we are, what we do, what you can do… Matt Johnson

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