whistle-stop tour of rightscale - an insider guide about working at rightscale

Whistle-Stop Tour of RightScale

Ali Khajeh-Hosseini

The cloud comp kool-aid

• Cloud computing is f***ing awesome

• It’s easy

• It’s cheap

• It’s scalable

• It cooks you breakfast and

takes the dog for a walk

Employee starts work on system

1. Used personal credit card to create AWS account

2. Because of minimal cost, employee didn’t get authorization for expenses, and plans on submitting it on their expense report

3. Didn’t notify IT of project as it’s a breeze to manage

4. Didn’t meet with corporate security for a system review prior to architecting and building deployment

5. Used AWS best-practices such as AMI’s, RDS, Autoscaling…

6. Employee didn’t document the process

7. All credentials, keys and AMI info are in an excel file on desktop

8. Didn’t consider risk or instability of AWS, or architect across regions

9. Deployment is done and ready, but not TESTED

10.Employee launches system into production (YES!!!)

Forecast…

It hits the fan…

• Employee has left company and is working for new employer

• Something went seriously wrong, couldn’t access services:

• Personal credit card is tied to the account thus,

• Company has no visibility or control over the account or running servers

• No documentation is available to dive deeper

• All critical information resides on the person’s laptop

Need a management platform

for the cloud

Overview

• Who is RightScale?

• What do they do?

• How was it? (working in a cloud startup)

RightScale

• Founded in 2006, based in Santa Barbara, CA

• Management platform for IaaS clouds• AWS, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack (private clouds)…

• 160 people and growing

• $45M VC funding

Large Scale

• Every day:• 60,000 servers are monitored• 35,000 alerts are triggered• 20,000 escalation emails are sent to users• 9TB of data is exchanged with our serves

RightScale Platform

Cloud Market Place• Basic components needed for a system

• Templates, scripts, images, macros

• Server Templates (over 40,000 customer templates)• MySQL, DB2, Apache, IIS, PHP, Rails, ASPX, LAMP

• Server Templates• Machine images don’t work well (too monolithic, big, static and opaque)• boot any server from a small set of very generic images and

configure the server dynamically at boot time

Server Templates1. Group of settings to define server type (i386, x64 etc.)2. Reference to a base image that is to be booted (CentOS, Ubuntu)3. Scripts that are run at boot time to install/configure all the software

• Version controlled (history, diff), mirrored in each cloud

Servers• ServerTemplate + instance in the cloud• Can be cloned, terminated, rebooted...

Deployments• Group of servers, arrays and other cloud resources• High-level overview of: costs, status, audit entries, inputs…

The mother of all cloud APIs

volumesvolume_attachmentsvolume_snapshotsserver_templatestagsmulti_cloud_imagesmulti_cloud_image_settings

Multi-Cloud API• Works with all RS-supported clouds• Users <–> RightScale <–> Clouds• Follows REST paradigm• JSON/XML responses, filters and views

RightScale Platform

Provide users with a single dashboard and API that can beused to manage all of their resources on different clouds.

Working at RightScale• Company culture• Technology overview• Projects I worked on• Tools I used

Company culture• Feels like a startup• Informal – no dress code, adhoc procedures• Dedicated, young, passionate people • Very dynamic, agile – flat organization• Be prepared to do something then scrap it

We like to eat• Monday lunches• Tuesday bagels• Release night dinner• Morning-after-release pastries• Lunch gang• Spoilt for choice

Big events• Release

• Dinner at 6pm• Start release procedure at 8pm• All systems are taken offline at 9pm• All systems are put back online at 10pm• We stay up until 2am fire fighting

• RightScale Employee Meetup (REM)• Every four months in Santa Barbara• One week of brainstorming, tutorials, food, drinking and music• A few honest customers giving feedback• 20 lightning talks

Technology overview• Around 50 code repositories• Ruby, and Ruby on Rails• MySQL and Cassandra• Wide range of projects

• Back-end services• Front-end web apps• Mobile apps• Systems and scripting• Automated testing

Projects I worked on• White team

• ServerTemplate testing and VirtualMonkey

• Green team• New signup flow (buy online)• API client• Multi-cloud API

• Yellow team• Automation• Multi-cloud API• Major refactoring of core services• …

Tools• Ditched Windows• Design: Wiki page + emails/comments• Code: Ruby, Rails• IDE: RubyMine• Source control: Git• Testing: RSpec, FlexMock, CI, AWS• Skype: always on

Summary

• RightScale is currently the most advanced management platform for clouds

• Working there has been amazing

• Get a free account and manage your cloud resources

• Free premium accounts for universities, email me.

ali@rightscale.com