Jisc asked Mimas how long it would take to migrate their national services to the cloud. Mimas had around 80 nodes with 120TB of storage across 10 production services and projects. They evaluated options like using Jisc's cloud once it was built, building their own cloud using Janet frameworks, or using commodity clouds. Mimas opted for commodity clouds like AWS and Azure due to cost, connectivity, and familiarity. They began migrating services like HistoricalTexts, Jorum, Jusp, Census, and Archives Hub to AWS, using services like EC2, EBS, and S3. Mimas estimated they could save around £400k per year by migrating to the cloud compared to maintaining their own infrastructure.

1. Jisc told Mimas to use the cloud; what happened next was amazing...
2015-04-02 Migrating national services to the Cloud

2. Mike Jones
Jisc

3. August 2013
“Dear Mimas,
How long would it take to migrate into the
cloud if you started tomorrow?
Love Jisc”

4. erm...

5. 10 Production Services and 10-20 projects
across ~80 Nodes ~120TB
Sun VMware Stand Alone Servers
14VMs
(+14)
30VMs
75 x 300 GB Disk Clariion
HP P2000 SAN 40TB
75 x 300 GB Disk Clariion
Dell Powervault 8TB
+Native server storage
Storage
Ja.net (via University)
~128 Public IPs
~750 DNS Records
~30 Zones
Connectivity
» + other service components already in the cloud

6. IaaS

7. With perhaps a smattering of PaaS

8. With perhaps a smattering of PaaS
Or not

9. 1 – 2 years

10. For a numbed of reasons, mostly procurement
and spending public money
3 months of head scratching ensued...

11. Options
»Use the “Jisc” cloud
»Use the Janet Framework
»G-cloud
»EGI federated cloud
»Commodity Clouds

12. Options Appraisal
»Use the “Jisc” cloud – it didn't exist
»Use the Janet Framework – Rent some rack space in a
yet to be built machine room, buy kit and build our own
cloud.
»G-cloud – tl;dr
»EGI – a bit too bleeding edge
»Commodity Clouds

13. Decision
»Opted for the Commodity Clouds
»How to choose:
● Cost
● Location
● Connectivity
● Familiarity

14. AWS with perhaps a smattering of Azure

15. How do we buy it?

16. After lots of Indirection and Misdirection
»AWS via Arcus through https://janet.arcusglobal.com
»Azure via reseller directly-ish

17. Ploughing into AWS

18. First up: HistoricalTexts
»Jisc Historic Books (later also Jisc Journal Archives)
● Elastic Search cluster of 4 x i2.xlarge
● Seadragon cluster 2 x m2.2xlarge
● Shibboleth or IP authenticated web front end
● MySQL
● ~40TB S3 storage
– mounted vis fuse s3fs*
● OCR

19. Next up: Jorum
»
● Elastic Search cluster of 2 (m2.2xlarge)
● Dspace & tomcat (m1.medium)
– Modest EBS* – asset store
– Shibboleth
● Web front end (micro)

20. Next up: Jusp and Mimas “Small Servers”
»
● Bespoke mashup of perl, php, Mysql, Apache
and Shibboleth
● We also host a number of small legacy
VitrualHosts
● 1 x m3.xlarge
● EBS for each additional web site

21. Next up: Census
»
● Reverse Proxy to various content
● Shibboleth Authentication
● initially micro instance -> small

22. Next up: Archives Hub
»
● Lots of service components
– Cheshire
– PostgreSQL
– VariousTripple stores.
– Tomcat
– Blogs andWikis
● CreateVM and let admins loose.

23. Large image slide headline style
Sub-headline if required

24. And some use of Azure

25. Copac*
»
● 2TB Oracle DB
– Enterprise Oracle
● Blog
● Website
● Shibboleth

26. Zetoc*
»
● Oracle DB
● Website
● Shibboleth
● Python
● Email
– Lots of emails

27. Miscellaneous Detail

28. AWS services used
»
● EC2, EIP, EBS, Snapshots
● Route53
● VPC
● IAM
– Shibboleth: http://bit.ly/ShibAWS
● S3
● SES
● SNS

29. Savings
»
● Mimas would spend at least ~£600k on kit per 3-5 years refresh
● Mimas would spend ~£250k p.a. on local support: 3 dedicated
external FTEs
● Mimas would spend ~£85k p.a. on internal support: 1 internal
FTE.
● Mimas would also pay salary overheads on all staff ~£15k p.c. p.a.
● a proportion of which would be donated the the ongoing support
of University IT
●
● ~£400k p.a. to support Mimas services

30. Savings
»
● Fewer dedicated IT staff (simpler systems)
● Mirrored Services -> Snapshots

31. Leaving remarks
»
● Don't want to get unduly tied into a cloud
provider
● Lift and shift is the quickest way to move
services into cloud
● There's money to be saved if you look carefully