PlanForCloud/RightScale hiring & training in Edinburgh!

We are hiring engineers and are bringing cloud computing to Edinburgh

It's been just over a month since we announced the acquisition of PlanForCloud by RightScale and we've been ramping up. Alistair Scott has joined our team as the first engineer and we've released some major new feature. And we're just getting started...

We're hiring & want you to join the team

Our office in Edinburgh's cool TechCube has plenty of space for new team members and we're looking for more people to join our team:

• Front-end Engineers
• Back-end Engineers
• Senior Software Engineers
• Technical Support Engineers

There's more... over 40 positions are available as part of the bigger RightScale team worldwide! Be sure to checkout the RightScale jobs page if you fancy working in Santa Barbara, the Bay Area, Texas, Utah, Seattle, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo or London. These positions are available across the board from Sales, Marketing, Services and of course Engineering.

We're running training courses

We are also running RightScale JumpStart Training courses in Edinburgh and Belfast if you'd like to learn more about cloud management, and how RightScale is used by thousands of companies to manage their applications in the cloud to realize cost savings, efficiency gains and faster time to market.

We're contributing to the Scottish startup scene

We are actively taking part in TechMeetups in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Inverness. We're also sponsoring tech events like the Startup Party that was held right next door to the TechCube last weekend.

 
-- Ali
Technical Lead, PlanForCloud

Cost Comparison Amazon Glacier vs S3

Experiment results: AWS Glacier storage is around 90% cheaper than S3 
and a good long term data-archive option 

Yesterday AWS announced their dedicated service for data archiving on the cloud. This new service, called Amazon Glacier, builds on the tremendous success of S3, which has been used to store over one trillion objects since it launched in 2006.

PlanForCloud supported Glacier from launch, and we're already seeing many of our users get cost forecasts for it. On average, each Glacier storage block, called a Vault in AWS terminology, is 3.2TB in PlanForCloud. That's just a monthly baseline; we're also seeing many users apply Growth Patterns to their Glacier storage to get more accurate and long term cost forecasts. One of the most popular patterns is to increase storage size by 10% per month.

Using patterns to model 10% growth in PlanForCloud

Let's take this example and forecast costs of using AWS Glacier vs AWS S3 (Standard and Reduced Redundancy). Read more about AWS Glacier or S3 Standard/Reduced Redundancy storage services if you are not familiar with them. Note that Glacier's annual durability is 99.999999999% per-archive, which is the same as S3 Standard, but S3 Reduced Redundancy is only 99.99%. There are also other differences between these storage service, for example, Glacier has a retrieval time of around 4 hours whereas you can download data from S3 instantly.

For this cost comparison example, we only concentrate on costs for storage. The data transfer costs are exactly the same in both scenarios, so they have also been left out of the graphs.

The following graph shows the 3-year cost forecast for our example storage (3.2TB baseline and add 10% every month. i.e. first month we would use 3,520GB). The final results:

• Amazon Glacier = $11K
• S3 Reduced Redundancy = $86K
• S3 Standard = $114K

That makes Glacier around 90% cheaper than S3 and a great long term data-archive option if the slow retrieval time is not an issue for you.

You can run this experiment for your own deployments on PlanForCloud.com,
no cloud credentials required and 100% free!

Results of Amazon Glacier vs S3

Next blog post: AWS Reserved Instances vs On-Demand: Breakeven point

-- Ali

[New Release] Welcome Amazon Glacier and SoftLayer + more detailed cost forecasts

This release introduces Amazon Glacier and SoftLayer into PlanForCloud. And our more detailed cost breakdowns will help you better understand your cloud cost forecasts.

We want to share all the cool new features we release in PlanForCloud with you, which we hope helps you in modelling cloud deployments, and better understanding and forecasting your cloud costs. So, this will be the first in our list of 'new release' blog posts. You can keep in touch and follow our journey through the PlanForCloud Twitter: @PlanForCloud.

So what's new?

Amazon (AWS) Glacier: Amazon Glacier is a long-term digital archiving service enabling users to manage their cold storage on Amazon at a very low cost. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon wrote a blog on the news: Expanding the Cloud – Managing Cold Storage with Amazon Glacier. We are excited to announce that PlanForCloud now supports Amazon Glacier, so you can get cost forecasts of your archives on Amazon Glacier.

We just ran a quick cost forecast and it's interesting: If you start with 100GB then add 10GB/month, it would cost $102.60 after 3 years on AWS Glacier vs $1,282.50 on AWS S3! Check out our other blog post comparing the costs between Glacier and S3.

Export to CSV: You can now export your cost reports as a CSV file, which can be opened in Excel.

SoftLayer: We now support SoftLayer in PlanForCloud. You can model your SoftLayer cloud components as part of your deployments. SoftLayer has the following clouds:

 

More detailed reports: We have also introduced more detailed cost reports to give you a better understanding of what makes up your deployment cost forecasts:

More detailed cloud cost forecasts

Price changes: AWS and Rackspace have updated their prices and added more components - that makes it over 6,000 prices in our database of cost points from the cloud providers that we support.

Better selection filtering: With the growing list of offerings by the different cloud providers, we have made it easier to filter through these options. You can now filter by cloud, operating system, database software and as always, search.

Have a look at our release pages for more information and user the new features: PlanForCloud release notes

What features would you like to see in PlanForCloud?

Everything we develop is made freely available to everyone. If you need a feature to support you in your cloud adoption strategy, there is a high chance others will find it useful too. We use UserVoice to collect feedback and enable everyone to vote for ideas. So if you have an idea or any feedback, please let us know using the feedback portal.

-- Hassan

How accurately can you forecast public cloud costs?

We've been getting a few questions from our users about how accurately they can forecast the cost of using public cloud services. In this post we have summarised one of the experiments we have run to compare our cost forecasts vs actual costs. We made a simple test deployment that was small to reduce the costs of the experiment, and at the same time provide enough scope for the accuracy of the cost estimates to be measured.

The aim of PlanForCloud is not to provide 100% accurate cost estimates, but rather to provide users with a cost forecast which enables them to make more informed business decisions about their cloud strategy.

Cost forecast experimental setup

Our experiment involved setting up a test deployment for three months on two clouds, namely the AWS US-West Northern California cloud (used as the primary hosting environment) and the Rackspace UK cloud  (used as the backup hosting environment). The test deployment, shown in Figure 1, consists of the servers, storage and database required for a typical web application such as a photo sharing website: 

Deployment and patterns created for cost experiment (click to see full-size)

• Users were represented by a remote node. They browsed the site uploading and downloading photos, thus creating data transfer in and out of the cloud. Growth patterns were created to represent a doubling of users every month, which in turn was assumed to double the data transferred in/out of the AWS cloud.
• The web server was an On-Demand Linux Micro instance that used the database server and the S3 bucket; however, this data transfer did not need to be modelled as it was within the same availability zone meaning that it was free [AWS EC2 pricing]. A pattern was created to represent an extra web server being needed every month to handle the growing number of users. Each web server also used a 10GB EBS volume.
• The photos were stored in an AWS S3 bucket. The size of this bucket was also assumed to double every month due to more users uploading photos (represented by another pattern).
• The database server was an On-Demand Linux Micro instance and it was assumed to store user details and site statistics. The database used a 20GB EBS volume, and it was assumed that monthly database backups would be stored on another cloud for disaster recovery purposes.
• The database backups were stored on Rackspace’s CloudFiles storage service (similar to AWS S3). A pattern was created to show that this storage would increase by 2GB each month.
• A redundant web and database server were also created on the Rackspace UK cloud for disaster recover purposes. These servers were 512MB RAM Linux instances (Rackspace does not have ‘types’ of servers like AWS EC2 does, they are named based on their RAM instead).

The deployment was updated manually to represent servers scaling up on a monthly basis (as described by patterns), and a simple Ruby program was used to generate 1GB text files that were used represent data being transfered in/out of the deployment.

Results - 99% accuracy

The actual deployment cost was $296.99 (sum of AWS and Rackspace bills), while the cost estimate produced by PlanForCloud was $295.26, which represents an accuracy of 99% for the experimental deployment. 

I should point out that this high level of accuracy may not always be achieved for two reasons:
1 - The assumptions used during forecasting were not right. For example, your storage requirements grew faster than expected.
2 - You are using extra features from the cloud provider that could not be modelled using PlanForCloud. For example, using IP addresses and other minor costs. If you think any major features are missing, please let us know through our feedback portal: PlanForCloud Feedback

The main point being made here is that PlanForCloud can produce cost forecasts that are accurate enough to enable you to make decisions about your cloud strategy. It also demonstrates that there is no need for manually calculating cloud costs on a spreadsheet, in which you would require expertise of the different cloud providers prices, and forecasts will be out of date when prices change. On top of that, using PlanForCloud enables you to run different scenarios within a few minutes rather than a few hours or even days.

There are of course scenarios where users do not know their detailed infrastructure requirements. In such cases, it would be best to create multiple deployments representing extremes in parameter values; this would enable you to get a range of cost forecasts rather than a single estimate.

You do not require any cloud accounts or credentials to use PlanForCloud, it is a completely free tool from the leader in cloud management, RightScale. Jump straight into the tool by clicking the 'Log in as Guest' button.

--Ali

PlanForCloud new team member - meet Alistair

Hi, I'd like to introduce myself as the newest member of the PlanForCloud team. Although I normally go by 'Ali', I will be switching to 'Alistair' to avoid confusion (Ali is one of the founders of PlanForCloud). I will be helping to develop the exciting new features we have lined up for PlanForCloud.

My background is in software engineering. I'm a Computer Science graduate from the University of St Andrews and for the last couple of years I've been working as a software engineer.

I'm delighted to be joining Ali and Hassan and also becoming part of the RightScale family. Working with others who are passionate about their product, combined with the great office environment (we are in the Edinburgh TechCube) makes PlanForCloud the ideal place for me!

Remember, we are hiring, so if you are a talented back-end or front-end developer please get in touch.

-- Alistair