The University of Maryland has created a robust analytics platform utilizing AWS and Tableau. This session will provide an overview of the Decision Support project at UMD, showcase the reports.umd.edu site built on an Amazon S3 server, and demonstrate how UMD has utilized Tableau to analyze and report AWS usage and billing data.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Madeleine Corneli
Product Management – Tech Partners, Tableau
Michelle Appel, Thomas Dobrosielski, Eric Sturdivant
University of Maryland College Park
Session 198250
Using Tableau and AWS for Fearless
Reporting at UMD
Ryan Malecky
Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Agenda
Tableau’s AWS Billing Solution
Tableau Server and AWS
The Maryland Use Case
Project Overview
Infrastructure Overview
Demo

3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS

4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Model Cloud BI Architecture
Raw Data Collect/
Store
Analyze Data
Warehouse
Analyze
Amazon
S3
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
RDS
Amazon
EMR
Amazon
Athena
Flat Files
Application
Data
Server
Logs
Internet
APIs
Tableau
Server

5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS - Databases
• Named Connectors
• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon EMR
• Amazon Athena
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Relational
Database Service (RDS)
• Postgres
• MySQL
• MS SQL Server
• Oracle
Desktop
Direct Connection or
Extract (In-Memory)
Connection from
published
datasource or workbook
Workbook, connection or extract

6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Server on EC2
Desktop
Server
• Self-Service
• Customer installs Tableau on their Amazon Elastic
Compute Club (EC2) instance
• Marketplace BYOL
• Existing Machine Image (AMI)
• Server is already installed and ready to go
• Customer purchases a license for Server from Tableau
• Marketplace
• Existing Machine Image (AMI)
• Server is already installed and ready to go
• Customer is billed for Tableau through Amazon

7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Server Sizing
• Start Small and Grow Later
• Scale Vertically
• Single EC2 instance
• Resize to a larger EC2 instance
• Scale Horizontally
• Primary + Worker Nodes
• Elastic Load Balancer

8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Architecture
• EC2 – Tableau Server

9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Architecture
• EC2 – Tableau Server
• Data Stores
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
RDS

10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Architecture
• EC2 – Tableau Server
• Data Stores
• Security Groups
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
RDS

11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Architecture
• EC2 – Tableau Server
• Data Stores
• Security Group
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Subnets
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
RDS

12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Tableau and AWS – Architecture
• EC2 – Tableau Server
• Data Stores
• Security Group
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• Subnets
• External Network
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
RDS

14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
- RightScale, 2018 State of the Cloud Report
“Optimizing cloud costs is the top initiative
again in 2018 across all cloud users”

15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Managing costs is a top priority for organizations at every
stage of Cloud maturity
• Enterprise IT is playing a strong cloud governance role –
including managing costs
• Only a minority of companies have implemented
automated policies to optimize cloud costs
Why?
How do we best enable organizations to monitor and manage their cloud deployments at
scale?

16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Connect with Tableau

18. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Dashboard prototype
analyzes spend over time,
MTD, broken down by sub
account and service
• Currently in use monitoring
AWS sandbox accounts
• Similar production
Dashboards are used
internally to monitor Tableau
Online pods deployed on
AWS

19. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Key Monitoring Metrics
• Identify cost/usage spikes
• Track down rogue or unused instances, switch to reserved
instances
• Monitor Software/OS systems – EoL & upgrade planning
• Plan for future scaling – forecast costs
• Which departments are using which services

20. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• EC2 spend analysis
• Target high-cost instances &
regional spend
• Plan for operating system
transitions, track OS spend
• Linux vs. Windows on
large/small instances

21. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
What’s Next?
Cost & Usage ✔
• Create a repeatable solution to share with AWS & Tableau users
Security
• Guard Duty - Intelligent threat detection & identification
• Amazon CloudWatch + AWS CloudTrail + VPC Flow
• Triggers events & outputs JSON files (similar workflow can be used
to automate this process)

22. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Fearless Reporting – The Maryland
Tableau/AWS Use Case

23. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Project Overview

24. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Motivation for Change in Ecosystem
System Issue Risk Level
Electronic Factbook
(Cold Fusion)
Out of Support, Not Performant High
“Canned” Reports
(Hyperion Server)
Incompatible,
Out of Support
High
Ad Hoc Reporting
(Desktop Hyperion)
Support ends 2018? Medium
Warehouse
(Oracle)
Not Performant,
Outdated
Medium

25. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Project Goals
Reduce Risk
Modernize
Data
Improve
Quality
Automate

26. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Project Overview

27. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Maryland Reporting Infrastructure (Simplified)
reports.umd.edu
Tableau Public Tableau Server
Redshift
Extracts
Oracle
…Aggregated Extracts
AWS – S3
AWS – EC2
AWS – Redshift
AWS – Oracle

28. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Rightsizing for Growth
6 Analysts
10 Reports
~25 Users
100s of Hits
25 Analysts
50+ Reports
100s of Users
1000s of Hits
?
June 2017
June 2018
June 2019

29. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
What Does It Look Like?

30. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Amazon
S3 Bucket
Audience
Public

31. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Amazon
S3 Bucket
Audience
Public

32. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Amazon
S3 Bucket
Audience
Campus

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Amazon
S3 Bucket
Audience
Campus

34. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Amazon
S3 Bucket
Audience
Campus

35. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Tableau
Server
Audience
Campus

36. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Environment
Tableau
Desktop
Audience
Individual
User

37. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audience
User
Group
Environment
Tableau
Server

38. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audience
User
Group
Environment
Tableau
Server

39. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audience
User
Group
Environment
Tableau
Server

40. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Audience
User
Group
Environment
Tableau
Server

41. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Key Takeaways
Scalable Architecture
AWS makes it easy to scale environments to meet demand
Value Proposition
AWS and Tableau provide a number of ways to purchase and deploy
products to provide maximum value to users while controlling central cost
Benefits of Visualizing AWS Billing Information
Tableau allows for visual exploration of AWS’s complex and massive billing
data, leading to better decisions regarding size and budget

42. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Speaker Contact
Director of Assessment and Decision Support
mappel@umd.edu
Michelle Appel
Thomas Dobrosielski
Information and Design Specialist
tdobrosi@umd.edu
Eric Sturdivant
IT Principal Engineer
sturdiva@umd.edu
University of Maryland
Tableau
Madeleine Corneli
Product Management – Technology Partners
mcorneli@tableau.com
Amazon Web Services
Ryan Malecky
Solutions Architect
rmalecky@amazon.com

43. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Please complete the session survey in
the summit mobile app.

44. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you!