As anyone using AWS will be able to tell you, there are good parts, and there are the bad ones. If you come from a datacenter background, you are most definitely not in Kansas anymore, and we had our share of learning experiences as a result. This is the story of all the pitfalls we encountered, and how, through architecture, convention and common sense, we managed to build an infrastructure that is "Always Up" from the end user perspective and incredibly economical to build, scale and operate. The talk will focus on leveraging the strong/economical points of AWS, while avoiding the weak/expensive ones. I'll give a break down of the pain points, how we managed them and how we avoided painting ourselves in a corner accidentally. For many companies starting today, success is defined by large traffic or user numbers; if you are one of those companies, these lessons will very likely save you significant operational headaches.

1. ARCHITECTING IN AWS
for resilience & cost at scale
Jos Boumans - @jiboumans
http://rafaykhan619.wix.com/downhouse
Thursday 22 August 13

2. RIPE NCC
Engineering manager for RIPE Database
http://www.ripe.net/db
Thursday 22 August 13

3. CANONICAL
http://lukeroberts.deviantart.com/art/Destroy-Ubuntu-93235775
Engineering manager for Ubuntu Server 10.04 & 10.10
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/server/overview
Thursday 22 August 13

4. KRUX
VP of Operations & Infrastructure
http://www.krux.com/
Thursday 22 August 13

5. SOME OF OUR CUSTOMERS
Thursday 22 August 13

6. LOTS OFTRAFFIC
http://www.americapictures.net/buenos-aires-traffic-city-night-argentina.html
Thursday 22 August 13

7. AVERAGE REQUESTS* / SEC
http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/happy-7th-birthday-twitter/
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
*Twitter: New tweets
Wikipedia: Articles read
Krux: New data points
0 3,750 7,500 11,250 15,000
Thursday 22 August 13

8. MONTHLY UNIQUE USERS
0 200,000,000 400,000,000 600,000,000 800,000,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://mashable.com/2013/03/21/happy-7th-birthday-twitter/
Thursday 22 August 13

9. WE CHOSE 'THE CLOUD'
http://previewnetworks.com/blog/
Thursday 22 August 13

10. THERE ARE DOWNSIDES
http://modernsavage.hubpages.com/hub/10-springfield-shopper-headlines
Thursday 22 August 13

11. RESILIENCE & COST AT SCALE
Thursday 22 August 13

12. FOCUS ON AWS
http://aws.amazon.com/
Thursday 22 August 13

13. APRIL 21, 2011
http://aws.amazon.com/message/680587/
http://aws.amazon.com/message/680342/
http://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/
http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
Also: June 29, 2012 - October 22, 2012 - December 24, 2012
http://businessnerds.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/so-far-so-good…-the-review/
Thursday 22 August 13

14. So#ware,)8)
Automa/on,)4)
Process,)14)
#"of"Issues"
ROOT CAUSE CATEGORIES
http://www.slideshare.net/rahultyagi50999/amazon-cloud-major-outages-analysis
Software bugs & human error
Thursday 22 August 13

15. JUNE 29, 2012
http://www.fanpop.com/spots/thunderstorm/images/25416163/title/thunderstorms-wallpaper http://aws.amazon.com/message/67457/
Thursday 22 August 13

16. AWS OUTAGE =YOUR OUTAGE
http://it.mario.wikia.com/wiki/Lakitu
Thursday 22 August 13

17. RESILIENCE @ SCALE
Embrace Failure: Hardware will fail. Humans will make errors.
Nature will produce thunderstorms.
http://blabitcanada.com/category/twitter-2/
Thursday 22 August 13

18. DEFINE 'AVAILABLE'
Things will break, so choose your degraded state.
http://libcom.org/library/occupied-wall-street-some-tactical-thoughts-malcolm-harris
Thursday 22 August 13

19. BASIC API CALL
3 potential points of failure
Thursday 22 August 13

20. FALLBACK PATTERNS
The cost of resilience should be accuracy or latency
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

21. FALLBACK PATTERNS
The cost of resilience should be accuracy or latency
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

22. FALLBACK PATTERNS
The cost of resilience should be accuracy or latency
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

23. FALLBACK PATTERNS
The cost of resilience should be accuracy or latency
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

24. FALLBACK PATTERNS
The cost of resilience should be accuracy or latency
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

25. USER EXPERIENCE
My tweet got posted
Thursday 22 August 13

26. RESILIENCETOOLS
Storage, Network & ACL
http://wordyou.ru/kolonki/my-teper-ne-na-avrore-a-na-titanike.html
Thursday 22 August 13

27. MANY SMALL NODESVERSUS
A FEW LARGER NODES
The benefits of the many outweigh the benefits of the few
http://www.stealingfaith.com/2012/07/08/throw-off-the-tiny-ropes/
Thursday 22 August 13

28. DATABASES
CAPTheorem applies.
Your choice: sacrifice availability or consistency. Orange is a lie.
RDBMS
BigTable Based
Master / Slave based
CouchDB
Dynamo Based
http://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem-checklist.html
Thursday 22 August 13

29. SIMPLE STORAGE SERVICE
S3:Arguably AWS' best feature
http://www.iwallpaper.us/gold-star-fo-christmas-wallpaper-140/
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=182919#182919
Thursday 22 August 13

30. CACHE WHATYOU CAN
HTTP Responses, DB Queries, User content
Browsers have caches too!
http://cruncht.com/95/drupal-caching/
http://redis.io/
http://memcached.org/
http://varnish-cache.org/
Thursday 22 August 13

31. CLIENT SIDE STORAGE
Keep a copy of your users data locally
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2010/09/ClientSideStorage.htmlhttp://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/03/badass-gadget-ammo-lunch-box/
Thursday 22 August 13

32. USE ELASTIC LOAD BALANCERS
They will save you more than once
http://wallpapers5.com/wallpaper/Balance-Green-Tree-Frog/
Thursday 22 August 13

33. USE GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING
Fail over to the closest data center on region failure
Thursday 22 August 13

34. SHOUT OUT: DYN
DNS for Bit.ly, Quora,Twitter,Wikia, Fastly, etc
http://dyn.com
Thursday 22 August 13

35. USE IAM ROLES FOR ACCESS
Humans make mistakes, including your humans
Thursday 22 August 13

36. COST @ SCALE
Scaling without breaking the bank
http://mgx.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/piggybank.jpg
Thursday 22 August 13

37. EMR + SPOT INSTANCES
On demand rate: $0.165 / hour
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot-instances/
Thursday 22 August 13

38. AMAZON REDSHIFT
Economical Business Intelligence
Scales with data size
http://www.flitemedia.com/music.php
http://aws.amazon.com/redshift
http://www.tableausoftware.com/
Thursday 22 August 13

39. AMAZON GLACIER
"Tapes for the Cloud Era"
Writes vastly cheaper than reads
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/http://www.gorp.com/parks-guide/glacier-national-park-outdoor-pp2-guide-cid350021.html
Thursday 22 August 13

40. AWS SIMPLE EMAIL SERVICE
Dealing with email is boring and time consuming
http://aws.amazon.com/ses/http://bfsdaniels.copycop.com/blog/all-about-printing/hypertargeting-with-direct-mail/
Thursday 22 August 13

41. AWS SIMPLE QUEUE SERVICE
Excellent for latency insensitive, small volume queues
http://www.toledoblade.com/Retail/2013/01/13/Disney-s-magic-bracelet-new-key-to-its-kingdom.html
http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/
http://colby.id.au/benchmarking-sqs
Thursday 22 August 13

42. INSTANCE MARKETPLACE
Buy & sell reserved instances
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Javanese_market_place.jpg http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/marketplace/
Thursday 22 August 13

43. AWS DYNAMO DB
Excellent for small keys & high read rates
at known & consistent IOPS
http://hlbike.en.ecplaza.net/2.jpg http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
Thursday 22 August 13

44. MAXIMIZE IOPS
RAID 0 Ephemeral drives
use m1.xlarge or c1.xlarge, or use ssds if you need >20k IOPS
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/10/16/a-systematic-look-at-ec2-io/
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html#disk-performance
Thursday 22 August 13

45. RED FLAGS
Anti-patterns to watch out for
http://grandprix247.com/2012/09/03/spa-pile-up-renews-focus-on-formula-1-safety-matters/
Thursday 22 August 13

46. PROVISIONED IOPS EBS
Ephemeral storage on c1/m1.xlarge or SSD is better
If you must: m*large or c1.xlarge for dedicated NIC
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/ebs-mongo-dbwebinarfinal-nn
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-performance-io-with.htmlhttp://navidoo.ru/interest/Nasha_jizn/17676.html
Thursday 22 August 13

47. AWS DYNAMO DB
For high write rates or
large/variable keys
http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/http://www.walltowall.co.uk/program/standing-tall-worlds-tallest-people_93.aspx
Thursday 22 August 13

48. HIGH IO/DISK/RAM NODES
Use them deliberately
http://elledecoration.co.za/2010/07/gigantic/
Thursday 22 August 13

49. AWS CLOUDWATCH
Metric collection,Amazon style
Cost prohibitive & resolution too low
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65683080@N08/6893582132/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
Thursday 22 August 13

50. LOWER COST PER METRIC
Use graphite & statsd
http://graphite.wikidot.com/
https://github.com/etsy/statsd
Thursday 22 August 13

51. HOSTED ALTERNATIVES
Circonus:All the insights you ever wanted
StackDriver: Optimized for AWS
http://circonus.com
http://stackdriver.com
Thursday 22 August 13

52. AWS CLOUDFORMATION
Templatize your entire stack
Harder to use as complexity increases
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/http://fullnfenil7.blogspot.com/2012/05/amazing-cloud-shapes-photos.html#.UhKrZmRgZHg
Thursday 22 August 13

53. RDS FOR ANALYTICS/REPORTS
Paying OLTP prices for BI usage
Sharding will be a matter of time
http://nerds.airbnb.com/redshift-performance-costhttp://business901.com/blog1/understanding-your-customer-problem/
Thursday 22 August 13

54. Q & A
http://vickicaruana.blogspot.com/2011/01/are-you-afraid-to-raise-your-hand.html
@jiboumans
http://slideshare.net/jiboumans
Thursday 22 August 13