Designing For Elasticity On AWS

November 9th, 2015 - CSA Meetup Oslo

Who am I?

Anton Babenko

Sr. Software Engineer at Telenor DigitalActive user of AWS since 2010. Organizer of AWS User Group Norway meetup.

Before:Web-developer, consultant and tech lead for the last 10 years.Zoozoo.com, mCash, SnappOrder, and many more.

E-mail: anton@antonbabenko.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonbabenko Github: http://github.com/antonbabenko

Agenda:

1) AWS and Elasticity2) Application layer3) AWS Services

What is AWS?

What is AWS?

• Low infrastructure cost• No guesses and planning upfront required• Unlimited scalability• Highly reliable

What is AWS?

Scalability, Security, High-availability, Testability, Fault-tolerance and Elasticity are configurable properties of the AWS platform on which application is running.

What does elasticity mean?

How designing for cloud is different?

The cloud changes several processes, patterns, practices, philosophies and reinforces some traditional service-oriented architectural principles that you have learnt as they are even more important than before.

How designing for cloud is different?

The cloud reinforces SOA principles:• Service loose coupling• Service abstraction• Service reusability• Service autonomy• Service statelessness• Service discoverability• ...

How designing for cloud is different?

The cloud brings some new philosophies:• Building scalable architectures• Understanding elasticity• Not fearing constraints

How designing for AWS is different?

• Not fearing constraints = “be creative in AWS-way”• “Design for failure and nothing fails”

SOA principles reinforced:• Service loose coupling - all• Service reusability - EC2, S3, Route53• Service discoverability - AS, tagging• ...

How to make app to get most of AWS in term of elasticity?

App should be scalable to be able to utilize cloud advantages fully.

What about web app ?

Web applications must be:1) Stateless2) Loosely coupled3) Able to scale horizontally

Advices:• Think parallel• Leverage different storage options• Automate everything

Read 12factor by Heroku.

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

Use Elastic Load Balancer:• Not free, but cheaper than your managed HAProxy (ELB

costs $0.028 pr. hour = $245 pr year)

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

Use Auto Scaling:• Free• Optionally combine with ELB

https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

Monitor what is going on using standard Cloudwatch metricsor add custom metrics.

• Dashboard (new!)

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

Use dynamic configuration to bootstrap instances:• SimpleDB or DynamoDB can keep configurations, for example

https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/

How to implement elasticity on AWS?

Automate everything:• Cloudformation• AWS CLI• Terraform by Hashicorp• …

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/https://aws.amazon.com/cli/ https://www.terraform.io/

How to get most of AWS?

1) Use free tier2) Use Route533) Use Cloudfront4) Experiment with instance types5) Decide which pricing model fits your needs best6) Use latest AMI and latest instance types7) Read

A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on Amazon Web Services

8) Browse Cloud Design Pattern

Are you well-architected?

AWS Well-Architected Framework

• Security• Reliability• Performance efficiency• Cost Optimization

Questions ?

Thank you!

We are hiring!

Credits:

https://sdqweb.ipd.kit.edu/publications/pdfs/HeKoRe2013-ICAC-Elasticity.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecturehttps://www.airpair.com/aws/posts/building-a-scalable-web-app-on-amazon-web-services-p1http://en.clouddesignpattern.org/ http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/http://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf