Case Study - Cloud Computing Opportunities

Opportunities

The ICT team of GEC believes that cloud computing can help evaluate, plan, design and implement a dynamically scalable and virtualized software engineering environment. As such, cloud computing is perceived as an opportunity to build a more flexible and cost-effective development and test computing environment for the engineers working at GEC. It should allow the organization to accelerate the product life-cycle and reduce costs by centralizing and automating the deployment, configuration and tearing-down of this complex environment. Through this strategic decision, GEC expects to obtain the following benefits.

·        Reduce capital expenses while at the same timeoffering the elastic scalability to handle fluctuating business needs.

·  Reduce dependency by allowing engineers to allocate and manage computing resources themselves with minimal intervention from the ICT staff.

·  Reduce operating and labor costs of managing, deploying and supporting software test configurations while improving productivity by eliminating the time spent on the setting and tear-down of the lab environment.

·     Facilitate innovation and improve time-to-market by reducing development and testing setup times from weeks to minutes.

·   Improve quality by eliminating critical software issues prior to deployment through testing in environments that more closely match production environments.

·       Maximize efficiency from a centralized lab supporting multiple and/or remote teams.

Action Plan

The action plan for the migration of the development and test computing environment to the cloud is broken down as follows:

The analysis will be based on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 and EBS services, which cater for a world-class infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing platform.

Sourcing of the development and test environment to the AWS cloud will rely on the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) architecture. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS computing resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources in a hybrid architecture that takes full advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud in a secured and dedicated area as shown in illustration 2.

Illustration 2: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Architecture (Graphic Courtesy of Amazon)

The ICT staff will create set Amazon Machine Image (AMI) templates—for the Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems—containing the software necessary (middleware, libraries, data and associated configuration settings) for engineers to perform their customary tasks as if they were working locally.

One small AWS EC2 reserved instance will be permanently allocated per engineer. In addition, engineers will be able to allocate additional EC2 instances on demand through a modified version of the Virtual Instance Reservation Portal (VIRP) application. On average, engineers will be able to allocate two more small instances on demand when development and test tasks require running software on multiple nodes.

Development and test data will be hosted on Amazon Elastic Bloc Storage (EBS) volumes. Amazon EBS provides block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable storage volumes that are particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block-level storage. Amazon EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as is needed. As such, engineers will be able to maintain multiple versions of the software components under development as well as multiple configurations and testing scenario setups without needing to hold a complete virtual machine for such purposes.

Developers will be allowed to create new EBS volumes of various sizes, ranging from as little as a few giga bytes to hundreds of giga bytes of storage, through the VIRP application and mount them onto their EC2 AMI instances dynamically. It is estimated that engineers will need on average no more than three EBS volumes ranging from 70 to 250 GB in size.

The number of managed servers—which for the most part are inefficient legacy machines whose use and purpose are not always clear to the IT team — and as such the virtual machines equivalent, will be drastically reduced. By transferring its computing assets to the cloud, GEC will also be able to “pull the plug”. on those unattended or quiescent systems and avoid the effect of server sprawling in the future.