National Instruments
Business Model Driven Cloud Adoption: What NI Is Doing In The Cloud
Ernest MuellerCloud Architect, LabVIEW R&D
[email protected] @ernestmueller http://theagileadmin.com
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The Short Form
We built a DevOps team to rapidly deliver new SaaS products and product functionality using cloud hosting and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as the
platform and operations, using model driven automation, as a key differentiating element.
With this approach we have delivered multiple major products to market quickly with a very small staffing
and financial outlay.
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National Instruments (aka “NI”)
• 30 years old; 5000+ employees around the world, half in Austin, mostly engineers; $873M in 2010
• Hardware and software for data acquisition, embedded design, instrument control, and test
• LabVIEW is our graphical dataflow programming language used by scientists and engineers in many fields
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From toys to black holes
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Genesis
• Our hardware and software product strategy started to spawn software-as-a-service ideas – some from customer demand, some from internal drivers
• There were existing product to Web integration points but these were uncoordinated and poorly maintained
• LabVIEW R&D greenfielded an internal group in 2009 to serve as a sort of internal ISV for hosted services, the dotCom team
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Challenges
• Poor R&D/IT relationship• Traditional siloed IT department (programmers split by
business unit, infrastructure split by technology)• Low organizational IT agility – 6 weeks to get a server• Uptime problems from complexity and silos• On premise data centers at power/cooling capacity• R&D primarily experienced in desktop software and
specialized, dedicated hardware, not server/Web/open• Consensus driven environment
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Now, Discover Your Strengths
• Strong base of “best and brightest,” motivated employees• Culture of innovation and “do it yourself”• Large Web presence (ni.com) with extensive in house
programming and operational experience• Entrepreneurial internal environment• Significant reinvention/retooling effort going on in R&D• Increasing focus on system sales and quality (performance,
reliability, security) over yet-more-features
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Starting Fresh - Blessing and Curse
Everything was new, so we had to simultaneously develop:• Products• Team• Process• Systems• Code• Operations• System Automation
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The Products (“Hosted Services”)
• Customer facing: LabVIEW Web UI Builder (In early access) LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud (In beta) Technical Data Cloud (In alpha) More in progress!
• Internal facing: LabVIEW.com Cloud Framework Cloud Hosting Operations
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LabVIEW Web UI Builder
• Write a LabVIEW(ish) app, save it to the cloud and run it there. • Build and deploy it to an embedded target and hook it up to Web
services to give it a sweet UI• Also, an experimental testbed for LabVIEW changes• Freemium model – use it for free, packaging and deploying your
app to a target requires a license (compiles run in the cloud) – try it at ni.com/uibuilder
• Silverlight RIA, back end on Amazon (moving to Azure soon) – EC2, S3, SimpleDB -> Azure Wen roles & blob/table storage; Java/Linux/Apache/Tomcat and .NET/IIS/Windows
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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud
• LabVIEW FPGA compiles take hours and consume extensive system resources; compilers are getting larger and more complex
• Implemented on Amazon - EC2, Java/Linux,C#/.NET/Windows, and LabVIEW FPGA
• Also an on premise product, the “Compile Farm”
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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud
NI Hosted Compile Service
User Login& Rights management
Links to user account& support
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LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud Cloudlet
LabVIEWFPGA
FPGA Services
FPGAServer FPGA
Worker
FPGAWorker
FPGAWorkers
LDAP
Auth Db
InternalServices
DNS LoadBalancer
InstallServices
MgmtServer Gateway File
Server
Routing
Web
Ser
ver
SecurityServices
License DbPIE
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Technical Data Cloud
• “I just want to upload my sensor data directly to the cloud, man.”
• REST and LabVIEW API that lets you upload and retrieve discrete and waveform data
• Welcome to the Internet of Things• Being built on Microsoft Azure – specific bits TBD,
all .NET
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LabVIEW.com Cloud Framework• Platform that makes the magic happen by providing base
plumbing for developers of SaaS apps• Core Services - reusable Web services and facilities • ILLS (internal login & licensing services) – distributed user
repo and licensing, complete with feed from Oracle and self service user portal; Java/Tomcat, OpenDS LDAP, mySQL
• PIE (Programmable Infrastructure Environment) – sets up systems for you, autoscales, deploys code; uses an XML model and runtime registry; Java – more on this later!
• Building out a core platform? Didn’t that slow velocity? No.
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Core Cloudlet
Browser UserPortal LDAP
Master
Auth Db Master
InternalServices
DNS LoadBalancer
InstallServices
MgmtServer Gateway File
Server
EmailQueue
Oracle
Routing
Web
Ser
ver
License Db Master
PIE
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The Team
• DevOps! Application architect Systems architect (me) 2 developers 1 system automation developer Operations lead 2 follow-the-sun operations staff in Malaysia
• Work with other R&D product developer teams Different orgs (LabVIEW, non-LV software, hardware) Geographically distributed (Austin, Aachen, Bangalore, Singapore)
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The Process
• Agile!• All systems work used the “developer” tools and systems as
part of DevOps collaboration philosophy Revision control (Perforce) Bug tracking (HP) Specs and reviews (Atlassian Confluence wiki) Task tracking and burndown (JIRA/Greenhopper)
• All members collaborate on all aspects of the product• Test driven development
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The Systems
• Cloud!• After a quick cost assessment and experimentation, decided
on Amazon EC2 as our initial hosting platform• Needed control and agility we wouldn’t be able to get
internally – dynamic requirements, fast scaling• Needed Linux and Windows both for software support• Using multiple point SaaS providers for functionality (If it’s not
core, outsource it!)• Agility and time to market far outweighed cost efficiency
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Code
• REST!• All REST-based Web services• Multiple tech stacks - cloud and systems mgmt code mostly
in Java, product code mostly in C#/.NET• Key cloud app architecture concerns – multitenant, parallel,
asynchronous, loosely coupled, APIed, instrumented, resilient in dynamic/ephemeral environment
• Developers deliver tests, monitoring, system model with their service
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Operations
• The “secret sauce”!• Not just ticket handling or “keep the lights on.” Focus on
delivering value to the customer and developer.• Provide performance management, availability, systems
management, incident handling, security, log management, monitoring, rapid deployment
• Inspirations: O’Reilly “Secret Sauce” paper, Velocity conference, Visible Ops book, Transparent Uptime blog
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System Automation
• PIE!• The “Programmable Infrastructure Environment”• XML system model defines systems, services, code installs,
runtime interaction• Runtime registry for systems info and eventing • PIE autobuilds the runtime system from the model –
provisioning, software installs, monitoring integration• Perform orchestration and control on many instances of
dynamic environments
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Results
• Win!• A continuous pipeline of products delivered quickly• LabVIEW Web UI Builder went beta in 2009, 1.0 in
2010• FPGA Compile Cloud went beta in 2010, 1.0 soon• Technical Data Cloud going beta soon• Unqualified happiness with cloud, DevOps approach• Not innovation vs. reliability – new approach gets both!
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Residual Challenges
• Selling SaaS products is a challenge to our existing channels• Managing the collision of engineering and IT technology• Culture – building collaboration, mutual respect, and trust
among globally distributed dev teams, ops, and others (QA, security, etc.)
• Educating desktop developers on operational issues• Maintaining vision through rapid change• Cloud-compatible tooling still emerging
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Where do we go from here?
• Complete the virtuous cycle of agile, cloud, mobile, social• Move to full continuous integration and deploy-on-demand,
necessitating intense investment in testing• Uptake of Microsoft Azure (mostly complete)• Private cloud products• Look into Lean• Can DevOps be spread out into the enterprise? We’ll see.• More SaaS products, and product to Web integration more
core to our product strategy
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Community Engagement
Austin is an awesome place for cloud work right now.• Austin Cloud User Group (acug.cloudug.org)• Austin OWASP (Open Web Application Security
Project) chapter• SXSW Interactive• Events like this one• DevOps and devops-toolchain Google groups• Velocity conference, DevOpsDays, CloudCamps
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