How cloud computing enables Tradeshift to deliver continuous and global e-invoicing and more
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Head in the cloud and feet on the ground How cloud computing enables Tradeshift to deliver continuous and global e-invoicing and more April 2011 Mikkel Hippe Brun [email protected] Twitter: @hippebrun Cell: +45 3118 9102 Anders Nickelsen PhD, Quality Assurance Engineer [email protected] Twitter: @anickelsen Cell: +45 3177 6511
description
Tradeshift delivers electronic invoicing and social networking to the browser of businesses around the world. To do so, we employ a highly dynamic cloud-based infrastructure that scales in near real-time. In this talk we present Tradeshift's e-invoicing product, how we manage the dynamics of the infrastructure and how we ensure a continuous product development- and delivery process. Anders Nickelsen has a background in networks and distributed system and has a PhD in computer networks from Aalborg University. At Tradeshift, he works as a quality assurance engineer with special focus on continuity of infrastructure management and quality of software releases.Mikkel Hippe Brun is co-founder of Tradeshift and holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from DIKU. Mikkel has worked for many years with e-invoicing and large scale infrastructures for exchange of business documents. Mikkel is chair of the OASIS Business Document Exchange Technical Committee.
Transcript of How cloud computing enables Tradeshift to deliver continuous and global e-invoicing and more
Head in the cloud and feet on the ground How cloud computing enables Tradeshift to deliver continuous and global e-invoicing and more
April 2011
Mikkel Hippe Brun [email protected] Twitter: @hippebrun Cell: +45 3118 9102
Anders Nickelsen PhD, Quality Assurance Engineer [email protected] Twitter: @anickelsen Cell: +45 3177 6511
Characteristic Practices have not changed much for 20 years Expensive infrastructure Traditional business models Costly for customers On-boarding of a customer is a project
Our industry
The problem with E-invoicing
Advanced business so.ware(ERP)
Accoun6ng systems
Office packages Paper + email / PDF
Mo6vated to move to e-‐invoicing
Connecting the long tail
Un6l now: No good solu6ons for this segment
Advanced business so.ware (ERP)
Accoun6ng systems
Office packages Paper + email / PDF
Establish an extremely scalable infrastructure Scales with our demand (up and down)
Offer our services for a fraction of the cost of our competitors No CapEX OpEx scales with customers (and gets cheaper with volume)
Think differently Is there a better business model? How do we provide real value?
Network Real time Sharing
Cloud computing allows us to
Blank slate No existing customers No legacy systems that must be maintained = No migration
Agile Pirate culture Flat organization Product development owned by teams
Emergence of Cloud technologies We could start cheap!
Our advantage
RASP: HTTP, SOAP, WS-‐Security, WS-‐
Reliable Messaging, SMTP, PKI
Danish Easytrade UDDI
4 3
2 1
UBL/ XML
Register Lookup
Dispatch
Receive
Easytrade (“Nemhandel”) Architecture
PEPPOL Architecture
Cloud + Open Standards + Open Source Software Can be used to realize extremely low-cost, secure,
reliable high-volume B2B infrastructure Lowering cost significantly & opening the
infrastructure Can bring small business into E-invoicing relationships
Capturing the long tail of small businesses Can be achieved by including them into a network and
making them discoverable
What We Learned from Building These Infrastructures..
Operations Cost per Unit
Today: ~1.2$ / Unit Sept. 11: ~ 0.12$ / Unit Sept. 12: ~0.04$ / Unit
Unit
The Cloud in Tradeshift
The cloud in Tradeshift
Software-as-a-Service
Self-organizing infrastructure Platform-as-a-Service Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Continuous deployment into self-organizing infrastructure
Software-as-a-Service
go.tradeshift.com Companies have isolated storage on a shared cloud-based
platform
No installations at customer sites
Public APIs
Integration points to 3rd party software and enterprise customers
Platform-as-a-Service Servers provided by Amazon EC2 + Rackspace Storage provided by Amazon S3 + Rackspace
We are (almost) independent of platform provider
Regular Ubuntu 10.04 installations (LTS) Virtual private servers with full access
New instances can be spun up in a matter of minutes Different instance types: Memory, processing, HPC (CPU+network) Enable modular infrastructure (every service on small dedicated
instances)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service 3-tier software architecture
Frontend, Backend, Database
State-less tiers (support: session sharing service)
Security groups for firewalling
Tier-based load balancing
Modular infrastructure allows for efficient scaling and load balacing
Infrastructure-as-a-Service Infrastructure as code
Programmable Testable Deployable
Reliability issue – full recovery from: Repository (code+infrastructure description) Application state backup (database) ’Bare metal resources’
Automated deployment and test of servers for infrastructure
Infrastructure connections programmed into deployment process
Entities register automatically with our monitoring tool for complete overview
Infrastructure-as-a-Service Deployable infrastructure + cloud = rapid replication
Infrastructure replicated into different environments Environments may be used short or long term
Manual triggering of automated environment deployment
Produc6on Sandbox Staging 1 Staging 2 Staging n
Infrastructure deployment tools
ControlTier Server instrumentation
Infrastructure deployment tools
Puppet Configuration management Rapid and reusable
Infrastructure deployment tools
Zabbix Infrastructure monitoring
Self-organizing infrastructure Can be seen as a traditional control problem
Zabbix monitors load on each tier (sensor)
ControlTier automatically spawns new servers when needed (actuator)
Load-balancing / fail-over Elastic load balancer (Amazon service) distributes load to pool of
servers (Frontend) Own customized application-based request distribution schema
(backend, database, proxies)
Automatically removes servers when not needed
Continuous deployment (integration/delivery)
Integration and release are frightening tasks Huge, complex, long lasting tasks that are difficult to
estimate in time and risk
Our continuous processes Automated build on each commit (fast) (Hudson) Automated test of each build (fast)
Tested in freshly spawned staging environments unit-tests, Selenium
Automated test of deployment process after each build Automated delivery of each successful build
Release early, release often
Continuous delivery into a self-organizing infrastructure
Classes of changes Purely code (bugfixes)
Direct into production Database schema changes (features)
Into new production environment redirection Environment changes (major features)
Environment specification changed Into new production environment redirection
Monitoring of product KPIs Ex. If signup rate or invoice rate decrease, something is wrong with the
latest deploy
Roll-back mechanisms for all scenarios Old references and environments are preserved
Feature bits – everything is in the code, either on or off Segmented roll-out, A/B testing
References
Tradeshift http://developer.tradeshift.com http://tradeshift.com
Self-organizing infrastructure Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ Puppet: http://www.puppetlabs.com/ ControlTier: http://controltier.org/ Zabbix: http://www.zabbix.com/
Continuous deployment Jenkins CI (Hudson CI): http://jenkins-ci.org/ Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/ SauceLabs: http://saucelabs.com/
Thank you
