Know before your customer knows:

Monitoring trends to predict failures in the cloud

Rakesh Ranjan Sriram Srinivasan Cloud Data Services, IBM Silicon Valley Lab

It used to be simple (… atleast for me, the developer)

§ I built a “product” - sometimes they were innovative, engineering marvels - and somebody sold them..

Dev

Cu$tomer

the “product” the delivered “product”

the release party. (and promotions + bonuses).(Confessions of a product developer)

it usually ended up in one of two ways..

Read the manuals,

whitepapers & “best” practises

Got mad & sad

Provided feedback & got help..

or hired “consultants”

Multiple releases later.. — satisfaction !

Heroes spoke about

the “successful” rollout

at conferences

Cu$tomer (the operator)

Dumped the product & somebody got the boot..(Confessions of a product developer)

What we do now..

§ Service Delivery § Monitoring & Operations § Service reliability engineering § Security & Compliance § Developer Advocacy § Support

Managed Services !

http://bluemix.net

https://cloudant.com/

+ …

Many moving parts..§ Bare metal servers in softlayer.com § Virtual Machines (Cloud Compute Instances) § Network complexity: firewalls & VLANs § Storage: SAN, ISCSI, Object store & backups § http servers, proxy/reverse proxy servers, Bluemix apps § Software: proprietrary, open-source § Delivery & Ops: Automation, Test, Monitoring & Control § Customers: free tiers, trial users, pay-as-you-go users & subscribers

- High Availability (near 100% up time requirement)

26k+ instances

55k+ users

1800+ servers in bluemix.net

1250 instances in cloudant.com

multiple data centers/Bluemix regions

Managed Services need smarter operations…

Management requires lots of Metrics & Visualizations

0

12,500

25,000

37,500

50,000

0

35

70

105

140

2014 2015

System Perf

User activity

Forums

Can’t just be in reactive mode..§ eNurture:

- Understand your users - And their apps & the technology they employ in the cloud. - Guide them when they need it and even before they realize they need help - Business imperative: Sell them more/upgrade them to better plans as and when

they grow retain and gain customers (keep users happy !)

§ Predictive analytics for Operational Efficiency - better planned growth - better forecast system failures - improve on Mean Time To Recovery - minimize cost of operations