Capacity Planning

 Capacity planning examines what systems are in place, measures their

performance, and determines patterns in usage that enables the
planner to predict demand.
 Resources are provisioned and allocated to meet demand.
 The goal of capacity planning is to accommodate the workload
and not to improve efficiency.
 Performance tuning and optimization is not a primary goal of
capacity planners.
 A system uses resources to satisfy cloud computing demands that
include processor, memory, storage, and network capacity.
 Each of these resources has a utilization rate, and one or more of these
resources reaches a ceiling that limits performance when demand
increases.
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Capacity Planning for Cloud
The reality of cloud computing is rather different than
the ideal might suggest; cloud computing is neither
ubiquitous, nor is it limitless. Often, performance can
be highly variable, and you pay for what you use.
“Capacity and performance are two different
system attributes. With capacity, you are
concerned about how much work a system can do,
whereas with performance, you are concerned
with the rate at which work gets done”.

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Capacity planning is an iterative process
with the following steps:
1. Determine the characteristics of the present system.
2. Measure the workload for the different resources in the
system: CPU, RAM, disk, network, and so forth.
3. Load the system until it is overloaded, determine when it
breaks, and specify what is required to maintain acceptable
performance. Knowing when systems fail under load and
what factor(s) is responsible for the failure is the critical
step in capacity planning.
4. Predict the future based on historical trends and other
factors.
5. Deploy or tear down resources to meet your predictions.
6. Iterate Steps 1 through 5 repeatedly.
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Defining Baseline and Metrics
The first item of business is to determine the current
system capacity or workload as a measurable quantity
over time. Because many developers create cloud-based
applications and Web sites based on a LAMP solution
stack.
These four technologies are open source products,
although the distributions used may vary from cloud to
cloud and from machine instance to machine instance.
On Amazon Web Services, machine instances are offered
for both Red Hat Linux and for Ubuntu. LAMP stacks
based on Red Hat Linux are more common than the other
distributions, but SUSE Linux and Debian GNU/Linux
are also common.
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Baseline measurements
Let's assume that a capacity planner is working with a system
that has a Web site based on APACHE, and let's assume the site
is processing database transactions using MySQL. There are
two important overall workload metrics in this LAMP system:
Page views or hits on the Web site, as measured in hits per
second
Transactions completed on the database server, as measured
by transactions per second or perhaps by queries per second.

Figure shows the historical record for the Web server page
views over a hypothetical day, week, and year are graphed.

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Contd..
A number of important characteristics are determined by these
baseline studies:
• WT, the total workload for the system per unit time
To obtain WT, you need to integrate the area under the curve for
the time period of interest.
• WAVG, the average workload over multiple units of time
To obtain WAVG, you need to sum various WTs and divide by the
number of unit times involved. You may also want to draw a curve
that represents the mean work done.
• WMAX, the highest amount of work recorded by the
system
This is the highest recorded system utilization.

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Load testing
Examining your server under load for system metrics isn't
going to give you enough information to do meaningful
capacity planning. Load testing seeks to answer the following
questions:
1. What is the maximum load that my current system can
support?
2. Which resource(s) represents the bottleneck in the
current system that limits the system's performance?
3. Can I alter the configuration of my server in order to
increase capacity?
4. How does this server's performance relate to your other
servers that might have different characteristics?

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Resource Ceilings
Whatever performance measurement tool you use, the goal is to
create a set of resource utilization curves similar to the ones
shown in Figure for individual server types in your
infrastructure. To do this, you must examine the server at
different load levels and measure utilization rates.
The graphs in Figure indicate that over a certain load for a
particular server, the CPU (A), RAM (B), and Disk I/O (C)
utilization rates rise but do not reach their resource ceiling.
In this instance, the Network I/O (D) reaches its
maximum 100-percent utilization at about 50 percent of
the tested load, and this factor is the current system
resource ceiling.
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 Contd..
WT is the sum over all the Web servers in your infrastructure:
WT = Σ(WSnP WSnV)
In this equation, WSnP represents the workload of your physical
server(s) and WSnV is the workload of the virtual servers (cloud-
based server instances) of your infrastructure.
Database servers are known to exhibit resource ceilings for
either their file caches or their Disk I/O performance. To
build high-performance applications, many developers
replicate their master MySQL database and create a
number of slave MySQL databases. All READ operations are
performed on the slave MySQL databases, and all WRITE
operations are performed on the master MySQL database.
Figure shows this sort of database architecture.

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Resource contention in a database server

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Network Capacity
If any cloud-computing system resource is difficult to
plan for, it is network capacity. There are three aspects
to assessing network capacity:
• Network traffic to and from the network interface at
the server, be it a physical or virtual interface or server
• Network traffic from the cloud to the network interface
• Network traffic from the cloud through your ISP to
your local network interface (your computer).

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Contd..
This makes analysis complicated. You can measure
factor 1, the network I/O at the server's interface with
system utilities, as you would any other server
resource.
For a cloud-based virtual computer, the network
interface may be a highly variable resource as the cloud
vendor moves virtual systems around on physical
systems or reconfigures its network pathways on the
fly to accommodate demand.
But at least it is measurable in real time.

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Contd..
Factor 2 is the cloud's network performance, which is
a measurement of WAN traffic. A WAN's capacity is a
function of many factors:
• Overall system traffic (competing services)
• Routing and switching protocols
• Traffic types (transfer protocols)
• Network interconnect technologies (wiring)
• The amount of bandwidth that the cloud vendor
purchased from an Internet backbone provider.

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 Scaling
 Scaling, from an IT resource perspective, represents the ability of the IT resource
to handle increased or decreased usage demands.
 The following are types of scaling:
 Horizontal Scaling - scaling out and scaling in
 Vertical Scaling - scaling up and scaling down

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Horizontal Scaling
The allocating or releasing of IT resources that are of the same
type is referred to as horizontal scaling (Figure 1). The
horizontal allocation of resources is referred to as scaling out
and the horizontal releasing of resources is referred to as
scaling in. Horizontal scaling is a common form of scaling
within cloud environments.

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Vertical Scaling
When an existing IT resource is replaced by another with
higher or lower capacity, vertical scaling is considered to have
occurred .Specifically, the replacing of an IT resource with
another that has a higher capacity is referred to as scaling up
and the replacing an IT resource with another that has a lower
capacity is considered scaling down. Vertical scaling is less
common in cloud environments due to the downtime required
while the replacement is taking place.

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19
Using Microsoft Cloud Services
Microsoft has a very extensive cloud computing portfolio under
active development.
Efforts to extend Microsoft products and third-party
applications into the cloud are centered around adding more
capabilities to existing Microsoft tools.
Microsoft calls their cloud operating system the Windows
Azure Platform. You can think of Azure as a combination of
virtualized infrastructure to which the .NET Framework has
been added as a set of .NET Services.
The Windows Azure service itself is a hosted environment of
virtual machines enabled by a fabric called Windows Azure
AppFabric.
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Contd..
Windows Azure service is an Infrastructure as a
Service offering.
A number of services interoperate with Windows
Azure, including SQL Azure (a version of SQL Server),
SharePoint Services, Azure Dynamic CRM, and many
of Windows Live Services comprising what is the
Windows Azure Platform, which is a Platform as a
Service cloud computing model.

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Contd..
Azure and its related services were built to allow developers to
extend their applications into the cloud. Azure is a virtualized
infrastructure to which a set of additional enterprise services
has been layered on top, including:
• A virtualization service called Azure AppFabric that creates
an application hosting environment. AppFabric (formerly .NET
Services) is a cloud-enabled version of the .NET Framework.
• A high capacity non-relational storage facility called Storage.
• A set of virtual machine instances called Compute.
• A cloud-enabled version of SQL Server called SQL Azure
Database.

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Contd..

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Google Web Services
Google applications are cloud-based applications. The range of
application types offered by Google spans a variety of types:
productivity applications, mobile applications, media delivery,
social interactions, and many more.
Google has a very large program for developers that spans its
entire range of applications and services.
Among the services highlighted are Google's AJAX APIs, the
Google Web Toolkit, and in particular Google's relatively new
Google Apps Engine hosting service.
Using Google App Engine, you can create Web applications in
Java and Python that can be deployed on Google's infrastructure
and scaled to a large size.
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Amazon Web Services
Amazon.com is one of the most important and heavily
trafficked Web sites in the world. It provides a vast selection
of products using an infrastructure based on Web services.
Amazon Web Services is based on SOA standards,
including HTTP, REST, and SOAP transfer protocols, open
source and commercial operating systems, application
servers, and browser-based access.
Virtual private servers can provision virtual private clouds
connected through virtual private networks providing for
reasonable security and control by the system
administrator.

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Working with the Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a virtual server
platform that allows users to create and run virtual
machines on Amazon's server farm.
With EC2, you can launch and run server instances called
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running different
operating systems such as Red Hat Linux and Windows on
servers that have different performance profiles.
You can add or subtract virtual servers elastically as
needed; cluster, replicate, and load balance servers; and
locate your different servers in different data centers or
“zones” throughout the world to provide fault tolerance.
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Contd..
Consider a situation where you want to create an
Internet platform that provides the following:
• A high transaction level for a Web application
• A system that optimizes performance between
servers in your system
• Data driver information services
• Network security
• The ability to grow your service on demand

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Contd..
Implementing that type of service might require a rack
of components that included the following:
• An application server with access to a large RAM
allocation
• A load balancer, usually in the form of a hardware
appliance such as F5's BIG-IP
• A database server
• Firewalls and network switches
• Additional rack capacity at the ISP

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Contd..
A physical implementation of these components might
cost you something in the neighborhood of $25,000
depending upon the scale of your application.
With AWS, you might be able to have an equivalent
service for as little as $1,000 and have a high level of
availability and reliability to boot.
This difference may surprise you, but it is understandable
when you consider that AWS can run its services with a
much greater efficiency than your company would alone
and therefore amortize its investment in hardware over
several customers.
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Working with Amazon Storage Systems
When you create an Amazon Machine Instance you
provision it with a certain amount of storage. That
storage is temporal, it only exists for as long as your
instance is running.
All of the data contained in that storage is lost when
the instance is suspended or terminated, as the storage
is reassigned to the pool for other AWS users to use.
For this and other reasons you need to have access to
persistent storage.

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Amazon Simple Storage System (S3)
Amazon S3's cloud-based storage system allows you to store data
objects ranging in size from 1 byte up to 5GB in a flat namespace. In
S3, storage containers are referred to as buckets, and buckets serve
the function of a directory, although there is no object hierarchy to
a bucket, and you save objects and not files to it. It is important
that you do not associate the concept of a filesystem with S3,
because files are not supported; only objects are stored.
Additionally, you do not “mount” a bucket as you do a filesystem.
The S3 system allows you to assign a name to a bucket, but that
name must be unique in the S3 namespace across all AWS
customers. Access to an S3 bucket is through the S3 Web API
(either with SOAP or REST) and is slow relative to a real-world disk
storage system.
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Contd..
You can do the following with S3 buckets through the
APIs:
• Create, edit, or delete existing buckets
• Upload new objects to a bucket and download them
• Search for and find objects and buckets
• Find metadata associate with objects and buckets
• Specify where a bucket should be stored
• Make buckets and objects available for public access

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Check Your Knowledge
1. Explain the essential characteristics of Cloud
Computing.
2. How is Cloud beneficial compared to the traditional IT
model?
3. Explain the different Cloud services models.
4. Describe the various Cloud deployment models.
5. What are the challenges of Cloud Computing?

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