In today’s world, technology changes at a breakneck speed. What was new this morning is outdated at lunch. Working in the AWS Cloud is no different. Every week, AWS announces new features or improvements to current products. As AWS technologists, we must assimilate these new technologies and make decisions to adopt, reject, or defer. These decisions can be overwhelming: we tend to either reject everything and become stagnant, or adopt everything and never get our project out the door. In this session we will discuss the attitude of iteration. The attitude of iteration allows us to face the challenges of change without overwhelming our technical teams with a constant tug-o-war between implementation and improvement. Whether you’re an architect, engineer, developer, or AWS newbie, prepare to laugh, cry, and commiserate as we talk about overcoming these challenges. Session sponsored by Rackspace.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
James Cowe, Director of AWS Strategy & Architecture
Eric Johnson, AWS Evangelist
November 30, 2016
Attitude of Iteration
ARC209

2. What to Expect from the Session
- The Challenge: An understanding of some of the
challenges we face in the ever changing cloud
- No Excuses: Shaping an application architecture that
will allow a successful iteration process
- The Model: Understanding our attitude and
responsibilities as technology leaders and implementers
- The Fun: Taking full advantage of the daily advances of
cloud computing

3. James Cowe
About the Speakers
Eric Johnson
AWS Evangelist | Cloud Architect | Husband |
Father of Five | Drummer | Less Important
@edjgeek
Scarred Cloud Veteran | Husband |
Father of Two | Guitarist | More Important
Social Media Luddite

4. We are ALL challenged

5. What Challenges Do We Face

6. What Challenges Do We Face
Increased
feature set
Decreased
knowledge pool

7. Velocity of Improvement
• Since its inception in 2006,
AWS has created more than
70 services
• 2,263 services or features
• 2016? On target for, well, a
LOT!
• 13 regions with 2+
Availability Zones and
growing.
48 82
280
722
1000+
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
2009 2011 2013 2015 2016
Yearly Features Added
Features

8. AWS in 2016
58%
YOY GROWTH
(Q2 2015 – Q2 2016)
1,000,000+
ACTIVE CUSTOMERS
PER MONTH
$11B+
RUN RATE

9. No excuses

10. The Architectural Excuse
“My application does not
have the flexibility to
change easily”

11. Inflexible
• Monolithic
• SPOF
• Synchronous
• Manual
• Uncovered
• Single environment
Resolving the Architectural Excuse
Flexible
• Microservices
• Redundant
• Asynchronous
• Automated
• Test coverage
• Multi-environment

12. The Knowledge Excuse
“We don’t know how to
leverage this new technology
and cannot afford to support
the training to learn.”

13. MySQL
- 10 servers @ r3.8xlarge
- Multi-AZ
- $55,350 / month
Squashing the Knowledge Excuse
Amazon Aurora
- 10 servers @ r3.8xlarge
- Read replica
- $33,969
- Reduce to two (2) servers
$6,793
- Saving $48,557 a MONTH!
AWS tests with SysBench on r3.8xlarge instances show that Amazon Aurora
delivers over 500,000 SELECTs/sec and 100,000 updates/sec, five times
higher than MySQL running the same benchmark on the same hardware.

14. Internally
• Create a cloud team
• Invest in employee training
and certification
• Provide incentives for
extracurricular learning
Resolving the Knowledge Excuse
Externally
• Team up with an AWS Audited
MSP that is dedicated to being
up-to-date on cloud
technologies

15. Knowledge = Informed Decisions
Adopt
- This will improve
our application
and still have a
return on
investment
- Going without
will hurt my
application
Defer
- This has
possibilities but
is beyond our
abilities at this
time
Reject
- This gain is not
worth the time or
money
- The technology
does not apply
to our situation

16. You are the model

17. Where Is Your Head?
Head In The Sky Head In The Sand Head In The Game

18. The Model
As technology leaders and practitioners,
how we handle change is the model by
which others will handle it

19. The Model
“YOU are the difference between innovation
and impairment - there is no in between”

20. Have fun

21. Standard Architecture
$875/month
Amazon
Route 53
Amazon
EC2
Elastic Load
Balancing

22. Serverless DB
$950/month
Amazon
RDS
(Aurora)

23. Serverless Hosting
$775/month
Amazon
S3
Amazon
CloudFront

24. Serverless Microservices
$425/month
AWS
Lambda
Amazon API
Gateway

25. Wrap Up
1. We are challenged – What challenges do you face and
how are you addressing it?
2. No excuses – are you conquering the challenge of
change or making excuses for deprecated technology?
3. We model change – is your head in the clouds, in the
sand, or in the game?
4. Having fun – are you iterating? Are you constantly
working to improve your app? Then you are having fun!!

26. Thank you!
Visit Rackspace in Booth 625

27. Remember to complete
your evaluations!