Ian Ward, Platform and Security Engineer from Mapbox, discusses how the AWS global edge network helps improve the availability and performance of delivering hundreds of billions of map tiles to hundreds of millions of end users across the globe on mobile devices, in cars, and over the web. In this session, Ian shares insights on how Mapbox manages day-to-day edge operations using Amazon CloudFront logs, dashboards, and ad hoc queries, and how Mapbox has configured CloudFront with dozens of behaviors and origins to customize their content delivery. Mapbox has grown from using a single AWS region to using several regions, so Ian also explains how his team uses Amazon Route 53 and open source tools to simplify complexity around regional failover, and how Mapbox leverages AWS WAF to deter attacks and abuse.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
lIan Ward, Mapbox
CTD304
How Mapbox Uses the AWS Edge to
Deliver Fast Maps for Mobile, Cars,
and Web Users Worldwide
Ian Ward, Mapbox Engineering
November 30, 2016

2. Who am I?

3. 13 people from Mapbox at re:Invent
Check out our booth

4. What I'll talk about

5. What is Mapbox?
Cost and performance
Configuration
Operations
Security

6. What is Mapbox?

7. A mapping platform for businesses

11. Mapbox maps power over 5,000 platforms
ranging from social to mobility apps

12. Design and data tools

13. Mapbox Studio

14. APIs and SDKs

15. /v4/mapbox.streets/z/x/y.png
256 px
256 px 8KB to 25KB

16. zoom 15 is
1.1 billion tiles
zoom 17 is
17 billion tiles

17. /geocoding/v5/mapbox.places/-77.03,38.91.json
~ 3 KB

18. /directions/v5/mapbox/{profile}/{coordinates}

20. Map matching API
Uploads API
Dataset API
Distance API
and more...

21. ?access_token=$JWT

22. API traffic is global

23. Couple days of
SDK data, 95%
NYC road
coverage

24. Where is our infrastructure?

25. 6 to 9 regions
60+ edge locations

26. Over 200 million MAU

27. Billions of requests a day

28. Cost and performance

29. Started in us-east-1,
with Amazon CloudFront

30. Client
GLOBAL 9 REGIONS 2 REGIONS
DNS
CDN
Route 53
Cloudfront
DNS
Route 53
ELB
App
servers
Cache
Object store
Database
S3
Dynamodb

31. Cache

32. Why use both max-age and s-maxage?

33. Cost: cache hit versus miss
For 1,000,000 requests
Origin Edge
EC2: $6.24 Requests: $1.00
ELB: $0.80 Transfer: $2.13
RDS: $6.96
Edge: $3.13
Total: $17 Total: $3

34. 82% cheaper

35. Performance: cache hit versus miss
Hits are 96% faster
than misses
ex. 12 ms versus 300 ms

36. Conditional Requests
Origin
ETag
LastModified
CloudFront
If-Match with ETag
If-None-Match with Etag
If-Modified-Since

37. 1,000,000,000 Conditional GETs
524 bytes at $54
25,000 bytes at $2125

38. Takeaways
CDN from the start
Know your content
Tune over time

39. Configuration

40. 60 behaviors and 13 origins

41. Order matters.

43. Options matter.

44. Test it. Automate it.

45. Takeaways
CloudFront has flexible options
Find ways to manage this complexity

46. Operations

47. 9 regions

48. Name Region
origin-maps.mapboxapi.com us-east-1
origin-maps.mapboxapi.com us-west-2
origin-maps.mapboxapi.com eu-west-1
…
…
...
Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing

49. What could go wrong?
Bad code
Bad deploy
Regional network issues

50. Automatic failover is not always such

51. Manual failover is error prone

52. Automated manual failover

53. https://github.com/mapbox/cfn-config

54. $ cfn-config update geocoder-production

56. Did it work?

58. Other ways we check edge status

59. CloudFront logs in Amazon Redshift

64. Takeaways
Tools for manual processes
Use familiar tools and workflows
Learn from your logs

65. Security

66. Scraping and DDoS

67. Fingerprint your bad traffic

68. Lots of traffic behind single IP
Unknown proxy
Single user agent
Irregular content profile

70. AWS WAF:
a web application firewall service

71. WAF CloudFront
Origin
Good users
Bad users

72. How to update?

73. $ cfn-update waf-production

75. Single computers and data centers

76. Takeaways
Ability to detect abnormal traffic
Keep log data accessible
Be familiar with your options to block

77. Conclusions

78. Thank you!

79. Remember to complete
your evaluations!