SPA Conference session: Inside the Cloud – Oxfam’s Experience | |||
| One-line description: | Uses Oxfam’s experience of moving its web applications into “the cloud” to seed discussion of what the cloud means for application development. | ||
| Session format: | Case study (75 mins) [read about the different session types] | ||
| Abstract: | The session will take Oxfam’s experience with the Cloud as its jumping-off point. Oxfam spent some time exploring options such as Amazon EC2 and the Google App Engine in 2009. It also virtualised many of its back-office applications (Finance and HR, Supporter Database, etc) in that year. Then in 2010 it decided to explore moving its web applications (website, e-commerce, intranet, etc) from the 30-odd servers in its web hosting facility to a cloud-based facility. That migration is now complete and we’ve learned a lot of lessons. Like how the difference between “public” and “private” cloud may not be as obvious as it seems. Or about the way in which cloud services cast a new light on a whole bunch of internal relationships. So we’ll describe Oxfam’s experience and use it to trigger discussion on questions such as: • Who drives development in the cloud? E.g. are teams within business units (as opposed to IT) likely to drive more development? • What standards do we need to develop effectively for the cloud? • What application lifecycles make sense in the cloud, where constraints on the number of dev & test environments, etc, are more relaxed? | ||
| Audience background: | No particular skills or background are assumed. Anyone who has experience of or has heard about this fuzzy thing called the Cloud would be welcome. | ||
| Benefits of participating: | • Learn about Oxfam’s experience of moving to the cloud • Identify some of the risks and gotchas of working in the cloud • Explore how the shift to the cloud might affect other aspects of application development | ||
| Materials provided: | |||
| Process: | The session will run in two broad phases: 1) We’ll describe Oxfam’s experience of moving its applications into the cloud and our key lessons learned from that experience 2) We’ll open out into discussion of some of the issues that the cloud raises for application development. | ||
| Detailed timetable: | 00:00-00:05 Introduction: Set the scene and discuss who’s here and what they hope to get from the session. 00:05-00:20 Oxfam’s Story: We’ll walk through Oxfam’s experience of moving into the cloud – the initial state, the project we went through, the current status, etc. 00:20-01:00 Lessons Learned: We’ll walk through the key lessons which Oxfam has learned from this experience – the economics of the cloud, the importance of standards, the impact on application lifecycles, etc. 01:00-01:15 Open Discussion: We’ll identify some of the questions which moving to the cloud raises for application development. For Oxfam, this includes questions such as: • Who drives development in the cloud? E.g. are teams within business units (as opposed to IT) likely to drive more development? • What standards do we need to develop effectively for the cloud? • What application lifecycles make sense in the cloud, where constraints on the number of dev & test environments, etc, are more relaxed? However, we’ll also see what other questions people might have. We’ll then choose the most interesting questions and start to think about what the answers might be (or how we might find the answers). | ||
| Outputs: | We will create a poster describing the themes which emerge from the workshop, for display at the conference. We will also capture the themes onto the conference wiki, along with photos of the materials created during the workshop, from which they emerged. | ||
| History: | We presented the Oxfam case study at the JBoye conference in Denmark in December 2011. The session in this form has not been run anywhere else. | ||
| Presenters | |||
| 1. Graham Oakes Graham Oakes Ltd |
2. Stewart Marshall Oxfam GB |
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