Following simple patterns of good application design can allow you to scale your application for your customers easily. We'll dive into the 12 factor application design and demo how this applies to containers and deployments on Amazon ECS and Fargate. We'll take a look at tooling that can be used to simplify your work flow and help you adopt the principles of the 12 factor application.

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28.03.2019
S T O C K H O L M

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S T O C K H O L M
28.03.2019
Breaking the Monolith
Modern Application Design with Containers
and the 12 factors app
Sébastien Stormacq
Technical Evangelist, AWS
@sebsto
M A D 4

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Best Software Architecture Practices
Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new
developers joining the project;
Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, offering maximum
portability between execution environments;
Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms, obviating the need for servers
and systems administration;
Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous
deployment for maximum agility;
And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development
practices.

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The 12 factor application
I. Codebase
One codebase w/ revision control, many deploys
II. Dependencies
Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies
III. Config
Store config in the environment
IV. Backing services
Treat backing services as attached resources
V. Build, release, run
Strictly separate build and run stages
VI. Processes
Execute the app as one or more stateless processes
VII. Port binding
Export services via port binding
VIII. Concurrency
Scale out via the process model
IX. Disposability
Fast startup and graceful shutdown
X. Dev/prod parity
Keep environments as similar as possible
XI. Logs
Treat logs as event streams
XII. Admin processes
Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes

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You know what’s great for a 12 factor app?

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RUNNING A SINGLE CONTAINER

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EC2 Instance
TaskTask
Task Task
EC2 Instance
TaskTask
Task Task
EC2 Instance
TaskTask
Task Task
EC2 Instance
TaskTask
Task Task
EC2 Instance
TaskTask
Task Task
RUNNING CONTAINERS

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RUNNING CONTAINERS AT SCALE WITH ECS
Availability Zone #1 Availability Zone #2 Availability Zone #3
Scheduling and Orchestration
Cluster Manager Placement Engine

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ECS
AMI
Docker
agent
ECS
agent
ECSTaskECSTask
ECSTaskECSTask
EC2 Instance

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ECS
AMI
Docker
agent
ECS
agent
EC2 Instance
ECS
AMI
Docker
agent
ECS
agent
EC2 Instance
ECS
AMI
Docker
agent
ECS
agent
EC2 Instance
Scheduling and Orchestration
Cluster Manager Placement Engine

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“Just launch 10 copies of
my container distributed
across three availability
zones and connect them
to this load balancer”
X 10

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One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys

15. Deployed VersionCode Version Control

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Staging / QA
Production
Dev #1
Dev #2

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Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies

18. Dependencies
Binaries
Code
Application
Bundle

19. Dependency Declaration: Node.js
package.json
npm install
# - or -
yarn install

20. Dependency Declaration: Python
requirements.txt
pip install

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Dependencies
Dependencies
Binaries
Code

22. Dependency Declaration & Isolation: Docker
Dockerfile
docker build

23. Development
Production
docker run

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Store config in the environment

25. Development
Configuration
Production
Configuration
Development
Production

26. Development
Production
Same container deployed to both environments.
Configuration is part of the environment on the host.

27. At runtime the container gets config from the
environment.

28. Application code pulls from the environment
Environment is customized when docker runs a container

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Treat backing services as attached resources

30. PostgreSQLapp1
Host
app2 3rd party service
Treat local services just like remote third party ones

31. PostgreSQLapp1
app2
Load balancer
Use CNAMES for maximum flexibility
and easy reconfiguration
postgres.mycompany.com
app2.mycompany.com

32. Easily create and maintain custom maps of your applications
Before
Version 2
After
Version 2

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Strictly separate build and run stages

34. Build
Dependencies
Binaries
Code

35. Release
Config ReleaseBuild Artifact
+ =
Tagged image stored in ECR

36. Amazon Elastic Container Service
Config

37. Run
Task Definition Release v1
Task Definition Release v2

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Execute the app as one or more stateless processes

39. Stateful container stores state in local disk or local memory.
Workload ends up tied to a specific host that has state data.
eu-west-1b
Container 1
Disk
eu-west-1ceu-west-1a

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Stateful data
Use services:
• Amazon RDS
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon ElasticCache
• Amazon ElasticSearch
• Amazon S3
• ……

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Export services via port binding

42. Port 32456
Port 32457
Port 32458

43. Port 32768
Port 33487
Port 32192
Port 32794
Port 32781
Match: /api/users*
Match: /api/auth*

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Scale out via the process model

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RUNNING CONTAINERS AT SCALE WITH ECS
Availability Zone #1 Availability Zone #2 Availability Zone #3
Scheduling and Orchestration
Cluster Manager Placement Engine

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Scaling
Instance
Container 1
Instance Instance Instance Instance Instance
+
Container 1
Container 1
Container 1
Container 1
Container 1

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Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown

48. Responsive Graceful ShutdownFast Launch

49. Fast Launch
Minimize the startup time of processes:
• Scale up faster in response to spikes
• Ability to move processes to another host as needed
• Replace crashed processes faster

50. Responsive, Graceful Shutdown
Should respond to SIGTERM by shutting down gracefully

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Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible

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Dev #1
Dev #2
Staging / QA
Production

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Staging / QA
Production
Dev #1
Dev #2
Local Application Remote

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Treat logs as event streams

55. Docker connects container’s stdout to a log driver
Containerized code writes to stdout

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CLOUDWATCH LOGS CONFIGURATION
Use the awslogs driver to send
stdout from your application to
Cloudwatch logs
Create a log group in Cloudwatch
Configure the log driver in your
task definition
Remember to add permissions via
the Task Execution Role
{
"family": "scorekeep",
...
"containerDefinitions": [
{
"name":“scorekeep-frontend",
...
"logConfiguration": {
"logDriver": "awslogs",
"options": {
"awslogs-group": "scorekeep",
"awslogs-region": “us-east-1",
"awslogs-stream-prefix": "scorekeep/frontend“}}
},
{
"name":“scorekeep-api",
...
"logConfiguration": {
"logDriver": "awslogs",
"options": {
"awslogs-group": "scorekeep",
"awslogs-region": “us-east-1",
"awslogs-stream-prefix": "scorekeep/api"}}
}
]}
Task Definition

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CLOUDWATCH LOGS
Logs Tab in the
Task Detail Page
View logs in the ECS or Cloudwatch Console

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Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes

59. Admin / management processes are inevitable:
• Migrate database
• Repair some broken data
• Once a week move database records
older than X to cold storage
• Every day email a report to this person

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61. Building Blocks for Containerized 12 Factor apps
Compute
Developer Tools Logging & Monitoring
Storage & Database
Networking & API Proxy
AWS Elastic
Beanstalk
AWS
Fargate
Amazon
ECS
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon S3
Amazon
ElastiCache
Amazon RDSAmazon
ECR
Amazon
EKS
AWS X-RayAWS
CodeBuild
AWS
CodePipeline
AWS
Cloud9
Amazon
CloudWatch
AWS
CloudTrail
Amazon
SQS
Amazon
SNS
Amazon
MQ
Amazon API
Gateway
Elastic Load
Balancing
Amazon
Route 53
AWS Step
Functions

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Sébastien Stormacq
Technical Evangelist, AWS
@sebsto

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