Take your CMS to the
cloud to lighten the load
Brett Pollak
Campus Web Office
UC San Diego
Campus Web Office
About the CMS
Qualifying academic &
administrative units can host and
maintain their websites with us
Manage over 140 websites in the CMS
Support over 900 CMS users
Redundancy at UCOP
CMS database replicated each day to UCOP
Webservers replicating constantly
…Not the best solution…
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a style of computing where…
Scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are
made available through Internet technologies.
Cloud Models
Saas (Software as a service)
You are provided with access to application software. You don't have to worry about the
installation, setup and running of the application. Service provider will do that for you. You
just have to pay and use it through some client.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)
Provides you the computing infrastructure, physical or virtual machines and other resources
like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers,
IP addresses, virtual local area networks etc.
PaaS (Platform as a service)
Provides you computing platforms which typically includes operating system, programming
language execution environment, database, web server etc.
What is “outsourced” to the cloud?
Advantages of cloud computing
In principal the cloud offers shared resources to provide economies of scale
Cloud does not require the purchase and maintenance of physical hardware
Cloud can provide elasticity to peak load capacity to accommodate spikes in traffic
(first day of classes)
Cloud can provide failover through the use of availability zones
Cloud can provide the ability to easily spin up environments for testing, training, or
temporary needs
Deployment Models
Private cloud:
Is a single-tenant environment where the hardware, storage and network are
dedicated to a single client or company.
Public cloud:
A multi-tenant environment, where you buy a “server slice” in a cloud computing
environment that is shared with a number of other clients or tenants.
Hybrid Cloud
On-premise datacenter resources are connected to a public cloud service
We created a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment in AWS
VPC is an extension of our on-premise datacenter
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Let’s you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud
You define the IP Space
Subnets
Hardware VPN
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Possible to connect multiple VPC’s together
ACT’s Hybrid Cloud
Amazon Direct Connect
Additional way to connect your private cloud to AWS VPC
Allows for higher bandwidth connectivity
VPN typically caps out at 4Gbps
Direct Connect offers 10Gbps
$$
Why is the CMS a good fit for the Cloud?
The service is relatively stand-alone…
Vendor supported application
Not reliant on downstream data feeds
Few integration points
Why take the CMS to the cloud?
Elasticity for predicted peak load times
Elasticity for unpredicted situations
Elasticity for unpredicted peak load times
Elasticity for unpredicted peak load times
Elasticity for unpredicted peak load times
Pricing
Factors that play into cost
Number of Amazon servers needed to handle your web
site traffic
The bandwidth consumed by your application, and
Which database or storage options your application
uses.
CMS costs with AWS
Monthly compute and bandwidth costs
$1,100 per month
Next steps: ACT’s Hybrid Cloud
VMs for recharge
3 departments in pilot phase
Full recharge service expected in ‘15