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ServerTemplate Deep Dive:Cloud Server Automation Made Easy

January 13, 2011

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Your Panel Today

Presenting:• Darryl Eaton – Director, Product Management at RightScale• Chris Horne – Director, Product Marketing at RightScale• Sanket Naik – Sr. Director, Operations at Coupa.com

Q&A:• Chris Williams, Account Manager

Please use the questions window to ask questions any time!

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Agenda

• Introduction to RightScale

• Introduction to ServerTemplates

• How Coupa is leveraging ServerTemplates

• How to Get Started

• Some Best Practices

• ServerTemplate Library & Contest

• Summary & Conclusions

Please use the questions window to ask questions any time!

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RightScale Real Customers, Real Deployments, Real Benefits

• Managing Cloud Deployments for 4 Years• More than 30,000 users; launched almost 2,000,000 servers• On-Demand with a range of customer service offerings

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What are ServerTemplates?

Virtual Machine ImagesStandard Cloud Images

ServerTemplates

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What are ServerTemplates?

Custom MySQL 5.0.24 (CentOS 5.2)

Custom MySQL 5.0.24 (CentOS 5.4)

MySQL 5.0.36 (CentOS 5.4)

MySQL 5.0.36 (Ubuntu 8.10)

MySQL 5.0.36 (Ubuntu 8.10) 64bit

Frontend Apache 1.3 (Ubuntu 8.10)

Frontend Apache 2.0 (Ubuntu 9.10) - patched

CMS v1.0 (CentOS 5.4)

CMS v1.1 (CentOS 5.4)

My ASP appserver (windows 2008)

My ASP.net (windows 2008) – security update 1

My ASP.net (windows 2008) – security update 8

SharePoint v4 (windows 2003) – 32bit

SharePoint v4 (windows 2003) –64bit

SharePoint v4.5 (windows 2003) –64bit

…

Configuring serversthrough bundling Images:

A set of configuration directives that will install

and configure software on top of the base image

Configuring serverswith ServerTemplates:

CentOS 5.2

CentOS 5.4

Ubuntu 8.10

Ubuntu 9.10

Win 2003

Win 2007

Base ImageVery few and basic

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What are ServerTemplates?Anatomy of a

ServerTemplateExample ServerTemplate

MySQL 5.0

RightScript/Recipe N

RightScript/Recipe 5

RightScript/Recipe 4

RightScript/Recipe 3

RightScript/Recipe 2

RightScript/Recipe 1

…

boo

t se

que

nce

RightScript/Recipe 6

RightScript/Recipe 6

ope

ratio

ns

…

Base Image

Start all services

Setup DNS and IPs

Restore last backup

Configure/tune MySQL

Install MySQL Server

Install monitoring

…

boo

t se

que

nce

Perform backup

Initialize slave

ope

ratio

ns

…

Right Image

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What do they help me do?• Affect Cloud Resources and specify cloud properties

(image, instance type, ssh key, security groups, etc.)

• “Record” everything you do to set up a server (install software, edit configuration files, start services, etc.)

• Extract variable configuration information [as Inputs]• Define custom monitors and alerts• Keep versions of your configurations, images, scripts…• Share best practices within your organization, or to the world• Incorporate best practices from others, and receive updates

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Coupa Cloud Spend Management• Goal - Focus on core business & scale with lean operations team

• Ruby on Rails – the cloud platform

• ServerTemplates are re-usable for each stage of SDLC• Coupa benefits from community contributions as accelerators

• sanket.naik@coupa.com

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Environment Lifecycle Management

apache

load bal

app server

api server

backgrnd

database

apache

app server

backgrnd

database

app server

backgrnd

database

all-in-one

Production Staging Test Developer

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Sounds great… How do I get started? • Two options:

Start from Scratch… or Search the Library

and add a RightScript:

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Mix-n-Match Pre-Built Components

Operating SystemsWindows 2003/2008CentOSUbuntuSUSE

Language/FrameworkPHPRuby/RailsJava/Tomcat.NETPython/Django

DatabaseMySQLSQL ServerMySQL ProxydbShardsMembase

Web ServerIISApacheNginxLighttpd

Load BalancingHAProxyElastic Load BalancerZeusaiCache

Automation ScriptingChefRubyBashPowerShell

You can mix & match scripting languages on same template: Bash, PowerShell, Chef, Python, Ruby…

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Some Key Best Practices• Add new scripts vs. modifying existing scripts

• If you import a ServerTemplate from the Library, try not to change the existing scripts. Instead, add new ones at the end and overwrite previous operations/configurations. That way, it will be easier to incorporate any future updates.

• Design idempotent systems• When writing scripts that create/modify configurations files, make them idempotent.

If the script is run twice, it will not destroy the configuration (e.g. ‘>’ instead of ‘>>’ for a new file).

• Kill processes before you (re)start them – remember that often, people may just be pressing a play button in our interface

• Trap errors informatively • Ensure everything is in the right place, exit -1 if not: you want your server to ‘strand’

appropriately with descriptive messages

• Leverage existing knowledge and assets• Learn from others – peruse other templates in the Library

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What if I’ve already created an image?• No Problem… RightScale-enable your image

1. Install RightLink Agent# rpm -i rightscale_5.3.0-centos_5.4-i386.rpm

-or-

2. Rebundle

3. Tag the image as RS-enabledprovides:rs_agent_type=right_link

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ServerTemplate Library• The RightScale Library holds

published ServerTemplates, RightScripts, MultiCloud Images, and Macros

• Public templates are available to the world – searchable, browsable, importable…

• Company templates are available to your organization

• ISV CE templates can be public, paid templates shared with specific customers

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ServerTemplate Showdown – Q4 2010

Winner for most Useful! Winner for Most Innovative!

Set up a standalone OpenLDAP server or a Provider-Consumer pair… with backups!

“Create your own CDN” by deploying these globally with load balancing.

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Why publish your ServerTemplates?

Organizations (internal) ISV Partners Community Developers

• Encapsulate best practices

• Standardize internal developer environments

• Maintain flexibility

• Cloud-enable your software product

• Gain valuable usage data

• Maintain portability• Increase exposure

• Drive awareness• Develop for many

clouds at once• Incorporate best

practices from others

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Human Capital

TimeRightScaleCloud APIs or Consoles

Initial Deployment

Accelerator for Initial Deployment“RightScale gave us the ability to get up

and running quickly. It would have taken three to four times the man-hours to

complete our initial deployment.”

Mobile Platform Provider

“Since we have been using RightScale as part of our solution, our new customer

deployment time has gone from roughly a week to a day – a time savings of

about 85%.”

Internet Service Developer

Efficiency Gains

67-85%

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Human Capital

TimeRightScaleCloud APIs or Consoles

Initial Deployment

Reduce Effort of Ongoing Maintenance

Efficiency Gains

67-85%

“We would spend twice the time managing our cloud deployments

without RightScale.”

Research Institute

"Starting with an existing deployment takes the time to deploy a new

application to minutes, literally a reduction in cycle time.”

Major pharmaceutical

Ongoing Maintenance

Efficiency Gains

50-90%

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ServerTemplates = Cloud-Ready Servers

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Have a project, but need some help?

Contact us: sales@rightscale.com or (866) 720-0208

Ready to get started?

Sign up for our Free Edition: www.RightScale.com/Free

Call us for a VIP trial of our paid editions

http://support.rightscale.com/12-Guides/Getting_Started

Need to learn more?

TCO calculator: www.RightScale.com/tco-calculator

Webinar archive: www.RightScale.com/webinars

White papers: www.RightScale.com/whitepapers

Q&A / Getting Started

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Thank You!

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25 Top Information Managers: 2010Dave Powers, Eli Lilly & Co.

“Alongside the elastic cloud approach, Lilly is leveraging RightScale's infrastructure management interface and services against appliance/application stacks in a "vending machine" concept that allows self-service to infrastructure and up to three tiers of applications as needed.”

Customer Example: Eli Lilly

IT Group maintains one compliant “Golden Image”

ServerTemplates encapsulate common scientific use cases

IT publishes internally to appropriate teams

Teams can access and launch approved templates themselves

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ISV Example: IBM• Encapsulating best practices

for using IBM software on the cloud

• Lead generation for the IBM Sales team (upgrade from Community Edition)

• View aggregated usage data for all templates and revisions

• Working with RightScale on related Solution Packs

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Developer Example: nginx+Apache

• Most Imported Submission (even though for paid only)

• Gain notoriety by showing your expertise

• Build a consulting business off shared best practices

Winner for Most Popular!

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More Winners!

Winner for most Useful! Winner for Most Innovative!

Set up a standalone OpenLDAP server or a Provider-Consumer pair… with backups!

“Create your own CDN” by deploying these globally with load balancing.

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Beyond Machine Images

Problems With Machine Images• Monolithic

• Not modular

• Opaque• Difficult to inspect, audit, change, version control

• Large• 90% is uninteresting, hard to locate interesting tidbits• Ex: only the apache config file may be interesting• Ex: new version of apache -> 1000’s of changed files

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ServerTemplates Alternative• Modular building block approach

• Configuration scripts (RightScripts)• Chef cookbooks & recipes

• A ServerTemplate defines what goes onto a server• Software configuration management• Default server characteristics, e.g. EC2 instance type• Monitoring & alert configuration• It’s a template –> it can be instantiated many times

• Benefits ▬> Modular + Transparent + Dynamic

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ServerTemplates: Many Constituencies

Virtual machine

OS

S/W Packages

Common config

Environment config

App Libraries

Vendor provided• Ubuntu/

RHEL/…• MySQL/

Oracle/…• Tomcat/

Jboss/…

Sysadmin defined• syslog config• SSH keys• Apache config

ApplicationDeveloper• Application• Cloud libraries• Web framework

Modular – Portable – Transparent – Dynamic

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ServerTemplates: Built-to-Order Servers

Virtual machine

OS

S/W Packages

Common config

Environment config

App Libraries

Linux image(minimal install)

Windows image(major apps installed)

Application

Flexible base-image / dynamic config boundary

Dynamic scripts/recipes(std packages + custom software)

Dynamicrecipes/powershell

(custom config)

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Auto-scaling Applications

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daemons

load balancers

EC2 cloud

databases

web servers

api servers

alerts

Demo – Dev/Test/Prod ServerTemplates

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How ServerTemplates Worko Server Identityo RightScripts / Cookbookso Dynamic Inputs

o Server state updateso Audit entrieso Monitoring data

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Demo – ServerTemplates in Action

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• Dynamically configure servers at run-time

• Abstract role and behavior from cloud infrastructure

• Modular and variable-based for easy maintenance

• Launch predictable infrastructure

• Portable

Dynamically Configure with ServerTemplates Create agile, automated, and predictable IT infrastructure

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• Agile = automate and benefit!• From boot to production on auto-pilot• Across different stacks & different clouds• Auto-failover, auto-restart, auto-scale

“Deploy faster, better, and cheaper than your competitors”

Agile Deployment

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Next Generation Server Architecture

• “Cloud-ready” servers• More than just running a bundled image

• Dynamic vs. static configuration• Leverage one server model across different

deployments• Replicable design• Complete lifecycle management … version control

• RightScale ServerTemplates