1. Building Scalable Database
Applications on AWS
Sundar Raghavan, Amazon
Greg Scallan, Architect, Flipboard
Eric Weller, Director, Earth Networks
Edward Dingels, Technical Lead, Earth Networks

2. Database Services: One Size Does Not Fit All
Amazon RDS
+ DynamoDB
ElastiCache
MySQL, Oracle,
Memcached
Apps that need Scalable Relational databases Apps that need Massive Scalability
YesSQL NoSQL

3. Building Database Applications – The Old Way
Demand Human Layer • Stuck with peak
capacity
• Human driven
• Time consuming
Q1 Time

4. What We Hear From Customers
“Help us focus on applications – Shift database maintenance time to more
productive application development time”
Security planning
Frequent server upgrades License/doc training
Backup rec 5% 5%
Constant storage upgrades load/unload
20% 5%
Scripting coding
Backup and recovery
Software upgrade and patching Performance and 25% 40%
tuning
Hardware failure replacements Install, upgrade, patch,
migration
Distribution of time
Source: http://www.forrester.com/Events/Content/0,5180,-1110,00.ppt

5. Building Database Applications – The New Way
Application Layer
Demand • Elastic capacity
• App driven
• Immediate
Time

6. Amazon Relational Database Service
RDS is a fully managed Relational database service that is simple to
deploy, easy to scale, reliable and cost-effective
Choice of Database Engines
Fully Managed Service
Push Button Scalability
Fault Tolerance with Multi-AZ
Works with EC2 & ElastiCache
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

7. High Performance Relational Databases
Amazon RDS Improve Increase Reduce
Configuration Availability Throughput Latency
Push-Button Scaling
Multi AZ
Read Replicas
ElastiCache
Push-Button Scaling Read Replicas ElastiCache

8. Push Button Scaling
Scale up your instance
and storage
Scale out as your app
grows
Automatic backup
Easy restore

9. Read Scaling with Amazon ElastiCache and
Read Replicas
Improve performance
with ElastiCache
Read replica for read
scaling
Off load BI and reporting
from production

10. Reliability For Production Applications

11. High Availability – Multi-AZ Deployments
Enterprise grade fault
tolerance
Synchronous replication
Automatic failover

12. Amazon RDS Customer Highlights
Gaming Web Apps Mobile/Social Media

14. Introduction
Your Social Magazine for Apple Mobile Devices
Delivers relevant articles and photos based on usage and
interactions within your social networks
Launched 6 months after the initial team put together
Over 5 million users and 2 billion page “flips” per month

15. Operating in the Cloud : Managing Complex, Real Time Data
6 months to deploy a real-time, socially relevant magazine
Challenge
Constantly changing user interests
Architecture Ability to change all hardware and software elastically
Frequently changing system requirements
App needs Complex queries on user and relevancy data
Milliseconds count. So, does uptime
Solution Highly performant, reliable, proven database technology
Amazon RDS MySQL

16. The Data View of the World
Flipboard Application
ElastiCache Memcache for
performance
Reliable and
Operational
Complex data,
Configuration
Queries
and State Data
SimpleDB RDS MySQL

17. Friends, Magazines …
anyone relevant to
me who published
something very
recently that I care
about seeing
Show Me More, Please!
A friend who recently shared a photo

18. Amazon RDS Tips For Success
1. Leverage the Cloud for what it does best. Don’t bring old DC habits.
2. Scale up for better performance.
3. Use RDS for complex, real-time data.
4. Use Read Replicas to augment write heavy databases. They are awesome.
5. Leverage existing SQL knowledge and experience.
6. Use copies of your database for testing new code. It’s trivial and saves time.
7. Scale horizontally with sharding. Plan for it before you need it.

19. SQL or NoSQL?

20. Relational Or Non-Relational?
Factors Relational (RDS) NoSQL (DynamoDB)
• Existing database apps • New Web scale applications
Application type
• Business process-centric apps • Large # of small writes and reads
Application • Relational data models, transactions • Simple data models, transactions
characteristics • Complex queries, joins and updates • Range queries, simple updates
Scaling • Application or DBA architected • Seamless, on-demand scaling
• Performance – developer architected • Performance – Automatic
QoS
• Reliability and availability • Reliability and availability
Skillset • SQL + Programming languages • Web style programming
Possible to use both SQL and NoSQL models in one application

21. The “Big Data” Scalability Challenge
Requirement: predictable,
consistent performance
Performance
 Hardware purchase and
provisioning
$! 

Data sharding
Data caching
 Cluster management
Reality: performance  Fault management
degrades with scale
Scalability

22. Kit, go
faster
Transformation 3:
From Scaling by
Architecture …
to Scaling By Yes
Command
Michael

23. Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides
extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability
Easy Administration
Low Latency SSD’s
Reserved Capacity
Unlimited Potential Storage
and Throughput

24. Amazon DynamoDB
NoSQL Database
Fast & predictable performance
Seamless Scalability
ADMIN
Easy administration
“Even though we have years of experience with large, complex
NoSQL architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the
business of managing it ourselves.” - Don MacAskill, CEO

25. DynamoDB Highlights
Low Latency
• SSD-based storage
nodes
• Typical latency =
Get latency
single-digit
milliseconds
CPU utilization

26. Provisioned Throughput
Reserve the IOPS needed for each table
Set at table creation
Increase / decrease any time via API call
Pay for throughput and storage (not instances)
• $0.01 per hour for every 10 units of Write Capacity
• $0.01 per hour for every 50 units of Read Capacity
• $1.00 per GB-month of Storage

27. DynamoDB Customer Highlights

28. Earth Networks Case Study
Eric Weller – Director of Development
Edward Dingels – Technical Lead

29. Introduction
Gathers and analyzes atmospheric observations from a
global sensor network to promote a better understanding
of the planet
Proprietary lightning network output used to pinpoint
lightning activity - best indicator of dangerous weather
Owner of the WeatherBug brand (mobile, desktop, Web)

30. Problem
Generate lightning alert notifications, in proximity
Need to the user’s location, on a mobile device.
Geospatial queries
Scalable
Constraints • 6 million existing mobile users
• 100% YOY mobile growth
• Severe Weather Outbreaks
Fast
• Speed + Accuracy = Safety
Reduce Time to Market
Cost of Ownership

31. Analysis
Provider Product Throughput Engineering Cost of
per Instance Cost Ownership
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Medium Low High
MySQL MySQL Medium High* High*
Earth Networks In Memory Quadtree High High Medium
Amazon Mem-Cache High Medium Medium
Amazon DynamoDB High Low Low
* Not currently supported by Earth Networks

32. Solution
Geo-Hash lightning data
Backend Windows service for loading/management
of data inside DynamoDB
Front-end web service for encoding/decoding
Use geometric instead of trigonometric calculations
Client computes actual range and produces alerts

33. Reflection
DynamoDB Advantages
• Easy to Provision
• Built-in Consistency
• Scalable
• High Availability
DynamoDB Wish List
• Automated regional DR failover
• Durability across regions in addition to inside a region
• Auto-scale down without a throttle on change
• Item size limit of 64k

34. Lightning Demo

36. Try Amazon DB Services!
Amazon RDS – Free usage
• For Details Visit Aws.amazon.com/rds
DynamoDB – Free usage
• For Details Visit Aws.amazon.com/dynamodb