Get Your Head in the Cloud

Steven Robert

Chief Information Officer

Billhighway.comTwitter.com/stevenRobert

About Me

Steven Robert | CIO – Billhighway.com

• Billhighway is…

– “Quick Books for Communities”

• > 250,000 members in 50 States & Canada

• Process > $1M in dues, fees & donations per day

• > $2 billion in transactions processed to date

Husband, Dad, Entrepreneur, Optimist, Problem-Solver, Passionate Technologist, Information Junkie & Life Hacker.

“Hell, there are no rules here,we’re trying to accomplish something”

~ Thomas Edison

Define: Cloud Computing

• Platform or “service” accessed over a network to provide advanced, often transparent functionality for mass consumption and high-availability.

• Seasonal or as-needed utilizationis a classic use case.

• Evolutionary:ASP -> SaaS/PaaS -> Cloud

Generally Accepted Characteristics

• Self-Service

• Delivered over the network

• Elastic scalability (grow as big as you need, pay as you go...)

* Think of it as renting IT resources vs. buying.

Cloud -> Business Translation

• Consider the cloud a technical utility.

• Understand your risk tolerance and current business stage to establish a threshold for use.

• Stages of a business:• Stage 1: Incubator (Speed to Market)• Stage 2: Growth (Competitive Differentiation)• Stage 3: Expansion (Core Competency)• Stage 4: Maturity (R&D)• Stage 5: Declining Conditions (Defense)

Technical Flavors

• Infrastructure Platforms

• Application Development Platforms

• Business App Platforms

• Special App Platforms:

Who are the Providers?

Early Adopters

1. Zillow – Amazon EC2

2. Intuit – Amazon S3

3. Animoto – Amazon EC2

– Released Facebook App: users were able to render photos into MTV like videos

• Ramped from 25,000 users to 250,000 users in 3 days

• Signed up 20,000 new user per hour at peak

• Went from 50 to 3,500 servers in 5 days

• Two weeks later scaled back to 100 servers

Sounds Great – Right?

• A few things to think about…

– Downtime: Gmail / Postini – “Going Google”

– Reliability: Twitter API

– Product Maturity

– Security

– Backups

Do Your Homework!

• PRO’s– Reduced costs

– Resource sharing is more efficient

– Management moves to cloud provider

– Consumption based cost

– Speed to market

– Dynamic allocation

• CON’s– Compliance/Regulation

laws mandate on-site ownership of data

– Security & Privacy

– Latency & Bandwidth guarantees

– Absence of robust SLAs

– Portability & lock-in

– Availability & reliability

Opportunities

• Mashups!

– Consume third party APIs

• Existing Market Places:

– Open Social / Google Wave

– iPhone / App Store

– Facebook

– Salesforce.com

Thanks!

Email: srobert@billhighway.com

Twitter: @stevenRobert

Blog: stevenRobert.wordpress.com