the choice of a cloud service provider some (incomplete...

INSPIRE Compliant Data and Services on the Cloud ‐WORKSHOP, Monday June 16th, 2014 1

The Choice of a Cloud Service Provider

Some (incomplete) Return-On-Experience

INSPIRE Conference 2014Workshop Sessions

Benoit BAURENS, AKKA Technologies (F)

June 16th, 2014

This content by the InGeoCloudS consortium members is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ingeoclouds.eu/.


Public CloudsA quick‐evolving market

Big Players Price war

IBM acquired SoftLayer for $2 billion in 2013 and commits $1.2 billion to expand the SoftLayer cloud Footprint

As for your holiday’s renting, you’re basically looking for:• Good location• Good price• Good quality• Trust

Amazon announced in March 30% decrease of their prices for CPU costs for its most-used instances types


Typical Categories of Requirements to Consider

• Location • Business Continuity• Technical Flexibility• Commercial Offers• Security• Support Services

We consider here the IaaS Delivery Model(Infrastructure as a Service)


« Location »Requirements Examples

• Guarantee data residency in some country and/or continent

for legal constraints for performance reasons

e.g. Data residency statements by IBM:Data storage location is the data center used by a customer to provision resources (e.g. a physical or hardware server). Whatever the storage solution chosen by the customer, data will be stored only in the data center in which resources are provisioned. The customer can also explicitly choose another data center when using storage services.IBM/SoftLayer does not replicate data over data centers, except for the Object Storage service (see below). In this case, data are replicated on data centers located in the same storage cluster (North America, Europe and Asia).


« Business Continuity » Requirements Examples

• Guarantee data stored on the Virtual Machine’s disks are not lost due to VM/hardware failure, for instance (i.e. disk RAID) CSP must provide solutions and best practices to

achieve data persistence beyond the end of instances lifetime.

• Guarantee for high availability (e.g. hardware maintenance – SLA)…one among many others!


« Technical Flexibility » Requirements Examples

• a varied catalog of instance types designed for performance in computing and/or disk I/O and/or network I/O.

Type VCPU RAM DD NIC

Tiny 1 720 Mb 10 Gb 1

Small 1 1 Gb 10 Gb 1

Medium 1 2 Gb 10 Gb 1

Large 1 4 Gb 20 Gb 1

XLarge 1 8 Gb 20 Gb 1

XLarge.100Go 1 8 Gb 100 Gb 1

• NB: Few CSPs actually offer real hardware on‐demand



Family Insta

nce

Types

Virtual

CPU

CPU

(ECU)

Memory (GiB) Instance

Storage

EBS-Optimized Network

Performance

General

Purpose

M1 1 to 4 1 to 8 1.7 to 15 1x160 to 4x420 not for all Low to high

M3 1 to 8 3 to 26 3.75 to 30 1x4 to 2x80 (SSD) not for all Moderate to high

Compute

Optimized

C1 2 to 8 5 to 20 1.7 to 7 1x350 to 4x420 not for all Moderate to high

CC2 32 88 60.5 4x840 - 10 Gigabit

C3 2 to 32 7 to 108 3.75 to 60 2x16 to 2x320 (SSD) not for all Moderate to 10 Gigabit

GPU

Instances

G2 8 26 15 1x60 (SSD) yes High

CG1 16 33.5 22.5 2x840 - 10 Gigabit

Memory

Optimized

M2 2 to 8 6.5 to 26 17.1 to 68.4 1x420 to 2x840 not for all Moderate to high

CR1 32 88 244 2x120 (SSD) - 10 Gigabit

Storage

Optimized

I2 4 to 32 14 to 104 30.5 to 244 1 to 8x800 (SSD) not for all Moderate to 10 Gigabit

HI1 16 35 60.5 2x1024 (SSD) - 10 Gigabit

HS1 16 35 117 24x2048 (SSD) - 10 Gigabit

Micro

Instances

T1 1 Variable 0,615 - - Very low


• segmentation and isolation of private network(s), e.g. VLANs

• provisioning of ranges of consecutive public IP addresses

• provide a VPN service (preferred with IPSec) between your and CSP’s infrastructures

• provide Firewall facility with customization on TCP/UDP and standard and custom port numbers

• provide a load balancing service that handles at least HTTP (TCP), HTTPS (TCP),




• Example of AWS for choosing best-fit storage methods

• some services (e.g. S3) are designed to reduce the risk of data lost whereas other services (e.g. Instance Store) focus on performances (high I/O)


• provide relevant PaaS solutions (e.g. Web mapping software, postgres/postgis, Hadoop…)

• provide tools (e.g. Web console) and services (e.g. monitoring, API) to fully manage the infrastructure

• Single tenant environment: the ability to run instances on dedicated physical servers, with the guarantee that other customers do not run their instances on the same servers. This usually ensures better performance and improves security. Generally more costly…

• Idem for network elements (virtual routers, firewalls…)

« Commercial offers »Requirements Examples


• single global point of contact to escalate technical and commercial issues

• provide PaaS-type services for data import and export. In particular, in order to backup data outside of CSP data center or in order to be able to eventually change of CSP in the future (Reversibility).

• Provide detailed billing: having a fine-grained, accurate and reliable view on the costs induced by usage of CSP services is a key requirement. Particularities of cloud accounting/billing versus more traditional hosting services necessitate careful and informed system design and deployment plan beforehand.

« Commercial offers »Requirements Examples


• comply with certification SOC2 type2 (in North America) and ISO27001 in Europe trust

• APIs for user authentication and roles management: Robust, time-tested solutions and know-how brought by the CSP are often judged by consultants and security specialists as preferable as a self-made authentication service, prone to security leaks with regards to the target infrastructure.

• Propose Public-key cryptography (PKI): securely communicate on an insecure public network, reliably verify the identity of a user via digital signatures

(source: Wikipedia)

« Security »Requirements Examples


• provide an helpdesk reachable by phone or direct chat

• provide a web-based trouble ticketing system consultable by customers

• provide webtools for supervising/monitoring main indicators about the resources used such as system health, RAM/Disk usage, Peaks of load, I/O statistics… This kind of supervision allows a fine-grained analysis of

infrastructure usage and informed decisions for evolutions.

• Systematically get alerts or information messages about maintenance operations

« Support Services »Requirements Examples


Choice of the Cloud Computing Platform in the

InGeoCloudS Project


InGeoCLOUDS Architecture


Estimated resources:13 instances, 2000GB storage, 20 GB/month network

We analyzed several Cloud providers:Amazon AWS, SigmaCloud, Atlantic.Net, Flexiant Flexiscale, GoGrid, Google App Engine, Joyent, Microsoft Azure, OpSource, Rackspace, OVH Public Cloud.

On the basis of several criteria:Functional/Software Requirements, Elasticity Model, As‐a‐Service Model, Maturity and Diffusion, Migration Cost Model

Including Monthly Cost:E.g., Amazon AWS €500, MS Azure €600, RackSpace €1200

We observed average 10% costs drop in the 5 years

Choice of the Cloud Computing Platform in the

InGeoCloudS Project


How to fairly bill users of a shared infrastructure?


Billing and Costs:Costs from Jan 2013

€‐

€1000.000

€2000.000

€3000.000

€4000.000

€5000.000

2013

Jan

2013

Feb

2013

Marc

h 20

13 Ap

ril 20

13 M

ay

2013

June

20

13 Ju

ly 20

13 Au

gust

2013

Septe

mber

2013

Octo

ber

2013

Nove

mber

2013

Dece

mber

2014

Janu

ary

2014

Febr

uary


Goals: To split the cost across the different IGC servicesTo split the cost across the different Data Providers

We have a per‐Amazon‐service billWe would like to minimize it !It is not easy to map this bill to the different services, and to the different levels of usage

If map from data provider A is accessed 10 times more than the map from data provider B, and B’s map is 10 times larger, who should pay more ?

We implemented a “fair” billing, which is a useful tool for the definition of an actual business plan

Billing and Costs


• A typical Amazon bill looks like the following:

• It is quite complex:– machine‐hours used but also I/O requests

• Fair‐sharing scenario:– how to split costs among users (i.e. data providers)?

Billing and Costs:Where do the costs come from ?

$0.50 per metric-month 4.244 Metrics 2.12

Amazon Elastic Compute CloudAmazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX

$0.065 per M1 Standard Small (m1.small) Linux/UNIX instance-hour (or partial hour) 8,252 Hrs 536.38

$0.260 per M1 Standard Large (m1.large) Linux/UNIX instance-hour (or partial hour) 966 Hrs 251.16$0.130 per M1 Standard Medium (m1.medium) Linux/UNIX instance-hour (or partial hour) 4,265 Hrs 554.45

Amazon EC2 EBS$0.095 per GB-Month of snapshot data stored 68.320 GB-Mo 6.49$0.11 per 1 million I/O requests 31,370,334 IOs 3.45$0.11 per GB-month of provisioned storage 3,536.993 GB-Mo 389.07

Elastic Load Balancing$0.028 per LoadBalancer-hour (or partial hour) 690 Hrs 19.32$0.008 per GB Data Processed by the LoadBalancer 5.253 GB 0.04

Amazon CloudWatch$0.50 per metric-month 4.244 Metrics 2.12


How to relate a data provider action to a usage share of cloud resource ?

Easy: data provider executes some computation on an on‐demand instance (e.g. shakemaps)Easy: data provider uses a portion of the total storageLess easy: web server shows a page of data providerNot so easy: CPU cycles/IOs to serve a database query issued during the visualization of a given map of data provider

General considerations:there are easy measurable resources, e.g., GBs of storagethere are shared services and functionalities, e.g., API server, replicated Database server, etc. etc.

Solution:Tag Amazon ResourcesParse Amazon detailed billing reportInclude reserved instances costStore resulting costs with the other indicators

Billing and Costs:Questions


Billing and Costs:Per‐service accounting


Detailed user’s share of costs (service by service)Methodology:

We defined 3 policies to share costs:A) proportional to usage. B) evenly. C) linear combination.For each entry in the Amazon bill, we defined which policy to applyEach entry in the Amazon bill is mapped to an IGC serviceCompute costs per‐data‐provider per‐service

Billing and Costs:Per‐User accounting


In some cases, usage can be measured accuratelyBy measuring directly storage occupancy (both DB and FS)

In others it is not possibleWe introduced Global Usage Indicator :

We assume that the number of map server requests is a good estimate of the IGC usage

It measures if data from provider A is more used than data from BIt approximates the ration of DB requests, FS requests, etc.

The indicator is calculated by parsing map server logsIt could be integrated with other sourcese.g. DB logs, portal logs, Triple store logs, …It is stored as a new indicator

The cost of Shared resource is accounted according to the Global Usage Indicator



Billing and Costs:Detailed Per‐User accounting


What we did wrong:We underestimated the development costs

Even if some tests can be done out‐of‐the‐cloud (which is not free anyway), one should plan a “twin”deployment

We took advantage of reserved instances lateMotivation: it was not possible to modify the reserved instance type, this changed only in Oct. 2013, i.e. when we started using reserved instances.

What we did well:Our early estimation was sufficiently correct

On the basis of in‐premises configuration of data providers’ infrastructures

Some resources were tuned over timeTuning in the type and number of instancesFrom S:5, M:5, L:1 to S:10, M:2, L:1

Billing and Costs:Observations about costs


Thanks for your attention

Before leaving

• Have your copies of the Blueprints(« How-To » series) and of latestnewsletters.

• Take some goodies (Cups)• And consider free trials on InGeoCloudS.

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