Business model driven cloud adoption - what NI is doing in the cloud
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National Instruments (NI) has adopted a cloud-driven business model to rapidly launch SaaS products through a dedicated DevOps team and model-driven automation. The company has faced challenges due to traditional IT silos but has enabled quick delivery of multiple products by leveraging modern cloud infrastructure and agile methodologies. NI aims to enhance collaboration among globally distributed teams and evolve its product strategy by integrating cloud services and promoting innovation alongside reliability.
Business model driven cloud adoption - what NI is doing in the cloud
- 2. Business Model Driven Cloud Adoption: What NI Is Doing In The CloudErnest MuellerCloud Architect, LabVIEW R&[email protected] @ernestmueller http://theagileadmin.com
- 3. The Short FormWe built a DevOps team to rapidly deliver new SaaS products and product functionality using cloud hosting and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as the platform and operations, using model driven automation, as a key differentiating element.With this approach we have delivered multiple major products to market quickly with a very small staffing and financial outlay.
- 4. National Instruments (aka “NI”)30 years old; 5000+ employees around the world, half in Austin, mostly engineers; $873M in 2010Hardware and software for data acquisition, embedded design, instrument control, and testLabVIEW isour graphical dataflow programming language used by scientists and engineers in many fieldsFrom toys to black holes
- 5. GenesisOur hardware and software product strategy started to spawn software-as-a-service ideas – some from customer demand, some from internal driversThere were existing product to Web integration points but these were uncoordinated and poorly maintained LabVIEW R&D greenfielded an internal group in 2009 to serve as a sort of internal ISV for hosted services, the dotCom team
- 6. ChallengesPoor R&D/IT relationshipTraditional siloed IT department (programmers split by business unit, infrastructure split by technology)Low organizational IT agility – 6 weeks to get a serverUptime problems from complexity and silosOn premise data centers at power/cooling capacityR&D primarily experienced in desktop software and specialized, dedicated hardware, not server/Web/openConsensus driven environment
- 7. Now, Discover Your StrengthsStrong base of “best and brightest,” motivated employeesCulture of innovation and “do it yourself”Large Web presence (ni.com) with extensive in house programming and operational experienceEntrepreneurial internal environmentSignificant reinvention/retooling effort going on in R&DIncreasing focus on system sales and quality (performance, reliability, security) over yet-more-features
- 8. Starting Fresh - Blessing and CurseEverything was new, so we had to simultaneously develop:ProductsTeamProcessSystemsCodeOperationsSystem Automation
- 9. The Products (“Hosted Services”)Customer facing:LabVIEW Web UI Builder (In early access)LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud (In beta)Technical Data Cloud (In alpha)More in progress!Internal facing:LabVIEW.com Cloud FrameworkCloud HostingOperations
- 10. LabVIEW Web UI BuilderWrite a LabVIEW(ish) app, save it to the cloud and run it there.
- 11. Build and deploy it to an embedded target and hook it up to Web services to give it a sweet UI
- 12. Also, an experimental testbed for LabVIEW changes
- 13. Freemium model – use it for free, packaging and deploying your app to a target requires a license (compiles run in the cloud) – try it at ni.com/uibuilder
- 14. Silverlight RIA, back end on Amazon (moving to Azure soon) – EC2, S3, SimpleDB -> Azure Wen roles & blob/table storage; Java/Linux/Apache/Tomcat and .NET/IIS/Windows
- 16. LabVIEW Web UI Builder CloudletWebLVCompilerWebLV ServicesBrowserSecurityServicesProjectDataWeb ServerInternalServicesAuth DbRoutingLicense DbPIELDAPDNSLoadBalancerInstallServicesMgmtServerGatewayFileServer
- 17. LabVIEW FPGA Compile CloudLabVIEW FPGA compiles take hours and consume extensive system resources; compilers are getting larger and more complexImplemented on Amazon - EC2, Java/Linux,C#/.NET/Windows, and LabVIEW FPGAAlso an on premise product, the “Compile Farm”
- 18. LabVIEW FPGA Compile CloudNI Hosted Compile ServiceUser Login& Rights managementLinks to user account& support
- 19. LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud CloudletFPGAServerLabVIEWFPGAFPGA ServicesSecurityServicesWeb ServerLDAPFPGAWorkersFPGAWorkerInternalServicesFPGAWorkerRoutingAuth DbPIELicense DbDNSLoadBalancerInstallServicesMgmtServerGatewayFileServer
- 20. Technical Data Cloud“I just want to upload my sensor data directly to the cloud, man.”REST and LabVIEW API that lets you upload and retrieve discrete and waveform dataWelcome to the Internet of ThingsBeing built on Microsoft Azure – specific bits TBD, all .NET
- 21. LabVIEW.com Cloud FrameworkPlatform that makes the magic happen by providing base plumbing for developers of SaaS apps
- 22. Core Services - reusable Web services and facilities
- 23. ILLS (internal login & licensing services) – distributed user repo and licensing, complete with feed from Oracle and self service user portal; Java/Tomcat, OpenDS LDAP, mySQL
- 24. PIE (Programmable Infrastructure Environment) – sets up systems for you, autoscales, deploys code; uses an XML model and runtime registry; Java – more on this later!
- 25. Building out a core platform? Didn’t that slow velocity? No.Core CloudletOracleBrowserUserPortalLDAPMasterInternalServicesAuth Db MasterWeb ServerRoutingLicense Db MasterPIEEmailQueueDNSLoadBalancerInstallServicesMgmtServerGatewayFileServer
- 26. The TeamDevOps!Application architectSystems architect (me)2 developers1 system automation developerOperations lead2 follow-the-sun operations staff in MalaysiaWork with other R&D product developer teamsDifferent orgs (LabVIEW, non-LV software, hardware)Geographically distributed (Austin, Aachen, Bangalore, Singapore)
- 27. The ProcessAgile!All systems work used the “developer” tools and systems as part of DevOps collaboration philosophyRevision control (Perforce)Bug tracking (HP)Specs and reviews (Atlassian Confluence wiki)Task tracking and burndown (JIRA/Greenhopper)All members collaborate on all aspects of the productTest driven development
- 28. The SystemsCloud!After a quick cost assessment and experimentation, decided on Amazon EC2 as our initial hosting platformNeeded control and agility we wouldn’t be able to get internally – dynamic requirements, fast scalingNeeded Linux and Windows both for software supportUsing multiple point SaaS providers for functionality (If it’s not core, outsource it!)Agility and time to market far outweighed cost efficiency
- 29. CodeREST!All REST-based Web servicesMultiple tech stacks - cloud and systems mgmt code mostly in Java, product code mostly in C#/.NETKey cloud app architecture concerns – multitenant, parallel, asynchronous, loosely coupled, APIed, instrumented, resilient in dynamic/ephemeral environmentDevelopers deliver tests, monitoring, system model with their service
- 30. OperationsThe “secret sauce”!Not just ticket handling or “keep the lights on.” Focus on delivering value to the customer and developer.Provide performance management, availability, systems management, incident handling, security, log management, monitoring, rapid deploymentInspirations: O’Reilly “Secret Sauce” paper, Velocity conference, Visible Ops book, Transparent Uptime blog
- 31. System AutomationPIE!The “Programmable Infrastructure Environment”XML system model defines systems, services, code installs, runtime interactionRuntime registry for systems info and eventingPIE autobuilds the runtime system from the model – provisioning, software installs, monitoring integrationPerform orchestration and control on many instances of dynamic environments
- 33. ResultsWin!A continuous pipeline of products delivered quicklyLabVIEW Web UI Builder went beta in 2009, 1.0 in 2010FPGA Compile Cloud went beta in 2010, 1.0 soonTechnical Data Cloud going beta soonUnqualified happiness with cloud, DevOps approachNot innovation vs. reliability – new approach gets both!
- 34. Residual ChallengesSelling SaaS products is a challenge to our existing channelsManaging the collision of engineering and IT technologyCulture – building collaboration, mutual respect, and trust among globally distributed dev teams, ops, and others (QA, security, etc.)Educating desktop developers on operational issuesMaintaining vision through rapid changeCloud-compatible tooling still emerging
- 35. Where do we go from here?Complete the virtuous cycle of agile, cloud, mobile, socialMove to full continuous integration and deploy-on-demand, necessitating intense investment in testingUptake of Microsoft Azure (mostly complete)Private cloud productsLook into LeanCan DevOps be spread out into the enterprise? We’ll see.More SaaS products, and product to Web integration more core to our product strategy
- 36. Community EngagementAustin is an awesome place for cloud work right now.Austin Cloud User Group (acug.cloudug.org)Austin OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) chapterSXSW InteractiveEvents like this oneDevOps and devops-toolchain Google groupsVelocity conference, DevOpsDays, CloudCamps
Editor's Notes
- #6: Just kidding about the black holes.
- #9: http://www.amazon.com/Discover-Your-Strengths-Marcus-Buckingham/dp/0743201140
- #11: Why niwsc.com? What does it stand for?Well, we suggested a bunch of domain names (like labview.com, natch) but management and product marketing ended up just picking something deliberately innocuous and semi-meaningless. “wsc” doesn’t really stand for anything, though you can plausibly create backronyms for it – “Web service.. Computers, or something!”
- #12: I trust you’ve all seen UI Builder by now. If not, ni.com/uibuilder.
- #13: Running in browser (can also run out of browser).Can save files to cloud or to local disk.Compiles happen in the cloud.
- #14: And it’s purty. We’ll use it in the demo!
- #15: A “cloudlet” is a term we made up, it’s a single product instance running in the cloud.
- #17: “Send it to the cloud!” Using the cloud should be extremely simple in your GUI.
- #18: You will notice the standard framework that this shares with UIB – we have created a cloud framework to supply cloud apps with the various things they need.
- #19: Would You Like To Know More? http://www.pachube.com/Good news – the Internet of Things is a hot Web trend! Bad news – of 2009. Machschnell! http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_5_web_trends_of_2009_internet_of_things.php
- #20: PIE: Would You Like To Know More? http://www.slideshare.net/mxyzplk/pie-101
- #21: So who wants to guess how many cloud servers we have?