Keynote delivered by Mark Seidenstricker, Infrastructure Architect at Monsanto.
The benefits of cloud computing are undisputed, but successful large-scale adoption remains a challenge for many enterprises due to the required shift in technology, culture, and operational models. This presentation will explore how we envision PaaS as the catalyst for a successful cloud strategy by enabling many of the benefits of cloud while simultaneously mitigating some common cloud adoption concerns.
3. Our Vision: Sustainable Agriculture
A Strong Vision That Guides All We Do
Monsanto Company is a leading global
provider of technology-based tools and
agricultural products that improve farm
productivity and food quality.
Improving Lives by Improving Agriculture
4. ADVANCED EQUIPMENT
AVERAGE CORN YIELD
–300 BU/AC
AUTOMATED WEATHER
STATIONS
FIELD SENSORS
PROVIDING
INFORMATION
ADVANCED IMAGERY
TECHNOLOGY
Doubling Yields by 2030 - Farming in the Future
Will Be Increasingly Information-Driven
5. Why Cloud?
PaaS as an Internal Cloud
• Enable and accelerate Monsanto’s adoption of AGILE , DevOps, and Continuous
Deployment/Release
• Adopt a technology stack which is open and allows portability between a variety of IaaS
providers (internal and external parity)
• Increase developer agility and productivity by enabling automated self service application
management
• Keep the cost of entry low, buy vs. build
Common Cloud Barriers
Most enterprise software stacks are not cloud friendly.
Agile development doesn’t work without agile infrastructure.
Emerging technologies are hard to try out, and even harder to adopt.
6. The Journey so Far
• Cloud Foundry & Bosh are stable open platforms with many large adopters
– CF Public PaaS Offerings: IBM BlueMix, Verizon, CenturyLink, HP, GE
– Although PCF is version 1.2, Cloud Foundry has been around since 2009
• Developer focused tool, and some admin and support capabilities are still maturing
– Large adopters have built their own tools or extended the platform to fill in any gaps
– Little monitoring/alerting, simple AD integration, IaaS provider specific features
• Pivotal can provide a turn-key solution for PaaS
– GUI’s, installers, 24/7 support, support for vSphere
• Various activities of the application development lifecycle can be reduced by 50% or more.
– Delivery, Operations, Release Management, Development
– Early success story: “over a week to just a few minutes”
7. 2014 Q1 (CF 1.1)
2014 Q2 (CF 1.2)
2014 Q3 (CF 1.3)
2014 Q4 (CF 1.4)
• Backup and restore
procedures for CF
• CF logging with
Splunk
• Multiple AZ support
in AWS
• Single click install for
VMware
•User authentication
via Direct AD integration
• Built in monitoring and
alerting of CF platform
components
• S3 compatible object
store PCF service
• Multiple AZ (cluster)
support on vSphere
•Role access tied to AD
groups
• DEA placement pools
•“Production” RDBMS
and Hadoop PCF services
•Single click install for AWS
•Encryption of app data
at rest?
Platform Requirements and Pivotal Roadmap
Full Scale Deployment
Ready
Does out of the box
functionality provide basic
“enterprise” requirements?
Limited Deployment
(Internal Only)
8. 2014 Q1 (CF 1.1)
2014 Q2 (CF 1.2)
2014 Q3 (CF 1.3)
2014 Q4 (CF 1.4)
• Backup and restore
procedures for CF
• CF logging with
Splunk
• Multiple AZ support
in AWS
• Single click install for
VMware
•User authentication
via Direct AD integration
• Built in monitoring and
alerting of CF platform
components
• S3 compatible object
store PCF service
• Multiple AZ (cluster)
support on vSphere
•Role access tied to AD
groups
• DEA placement pools
•“Production” RDBMS
and Hadoop PCF services
•Single click install for AWS
•Encryption of app data
at rest?
Platform Requirements and Pivotal Roadmap
Full Scale Deployment
Ready
Does out of the box
functionality provide basic
“enterprise” requirements?
Limited Deployment
(Internal Only)
You Are
Here
9. Our PaaS Strategy
• Proceed with an internal cloud foundry environment
– Provide an internal proving grounds for cloud application architectures and processes including
DevOps
– Internal cloud allows us to mitigate challenges with cost models, security, and data classification
– Shift from proprietary non-cloud friendly software towards open-source emerging technologies which
would be available at an external cloud offering
• Target new non-business critical apps which will run dev through prod on CF
– Live applications serving meaning internal business processes
– Gather real life metrics on improvements to various aspects of the development lifecycle (delivery,
support, discovery, etc) to build a true TCO
– Assess actual impact of existing known and unknown product gaps
• Based on our completed assessment, proceed with a full scale deployment 2015
– Senior management commitment on cloud: Not if, but how
– Vision to drive revenue through disruptive innovation