1. Best Practices For Hosting Web Applications on AWS
Jeff Barr
Senior Web Services Evangelist
@jeffbarr
Matt Tavis
Solutions Architect

2. Today’s Agenda
Availability
Static content
Multi-tier applications
Summary

3. Spectrum of Websites

4. Spectrum of Websites
Static Dynamic

5. Spectrum of Websites
Static Dynamic
Simple Complex

6. Spectrum of Websites
Static Dynamic
Simple Complex
Niche Mass Market

7. Get Your Priorities Straight
Availability is important
 Support your customers
 Support your business
However…

8. Everything fails
all the time
Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO

9. Infrastructure Services Can Save The Day

10. Your Data is a Royal Garden

11. Your Infrastructructure is a Fungible Resource

12. Patterns for High Availability

13. Pattern 1
Static Content

14. Images
Stylesheets
Streaming
content
Web pages Web
Assets Blog posts
PDFs Javascript
Videos

15. High High
Redundancy Availability
Amazon S3
High
durability

16. S3 Object Access URLs
http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/objectid
http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/objectid
https://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/objectid
https://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/objectid

17. S3 Uses
Perfect for asset hosting
Perfect for website hosting
Let’s see how…

18. aws.amazon.com/console

22. Make everything public

23. https://s3.amazonaws.com/jbarr/site/index.html

25. However….
Brittle, unfriendly URL
S3 website hosting
Root objects
Error pages

28. http://jbarr.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

29. Content Distribution – Amazon CloudFront
Speed of light causes increased latency with distance….

30. Amazon CloudFront
Global edge caching (18 locations)
Friendly URLs – default root object
Distribution-based
Let’s see how…

33. d3e7617hqtdwhu.cloudfront.net

34. http://d3e7617hqtdwhu.cloudfront.net/site/jeffbarr.jpg

35. What Did We Do?
Upload website to S3
Create CloudFront Distribution
Make site (file and image) accessible with low latency
Current CloudFront edge locations:
• Ashburn, VA • St. Louis, MO
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX • Amsterdam
• Jacksonville, FL • Dublin
• Los Angeles, CA • Frankfurt
• Miami, FL • London
• New York, NY • Paris
• Newark, NJ • Hong Kong
• Palo Alto, CA • Tokyo
• Seattle, WA • Singapore

36. Update DNS Entry
www.jeff-barr.com

37. What We Have Built
www.jeff-barr.com
Global DNS CNAME
Global Amazon CloudFront
Regional Amazon S3
Redundant storage

38. Pattern 2
Dynamic or Multi-Tier Content

39. Ruby on Rails
PHP
Django
Perl
Dynamic
Spring
Database
Data store

40. Blogs
E-commerce
Gaming
Dynamic
Apps
Productivity
Social networks

41. Elastic Multiple
Capacity Instance
Sizes
Amazon EC2
On-demand

42. Mastering Multiple
failure availability
zones
High Availability
Automation
and monitoring

43. High Availability With EC2
Single Server Fail Over

44. High Availability With EC2
Elastic IP Address
EC2 Instance
EBS Storage
EBS Snapshot

45. Instance Failure
Elastic IP Address
EC2 Instance
EBS Storage
EBS Snapshot

46. Instance Failure – Replace Instance
Elastic IP Address
EC2 Instance EC2 Instance
EBS Storage
EBS Snapshot

47. Instance Failure –Back to Normal
Elastic IP Address
EC2 Instance
EBS Storage
EBS Snapshot

48. Attributes
Inexpensive but not ideal
Requires monitoring and automation
Allows for ‘hot swap’

49. High Availability With EC2
Horizontal Redundancy
for Multi-Tier Applications

50. Multiple Tiers
Web Servers
Application Servers
Data Store

51. Multiple Tiers with Redundancy at Each Tier
Web Servers
Web Servers
Web Servers
Application Servers
Application Servers
Application Servers
Data Store
Data Store
Data Store

52. This Architecture Tolerates Instance Failure
Web Servers
Web Servers
Web Servers
Application Servers
Application Servers
Application Servers
Data Store
Data Store
Data Store

53. Tolerant to Availability Zone Failure
Elastic Load Balancer
Web Servers Web Servers
Web Servers Web Servers
Web Servers Web Servers
Application Servers
Application Servers Application Servers
Application Servers Application Servers
Application Servers
Data Store Data Store
Data Store Data Store
Data Store Data Store
US-East-1A US-East-1B
US-East

54. Scale In and Scale Out as Needed
Web Servers
Web Servers
Web Servers
ApplicationServers
Servers
ApplicationServers
ApplicationServers
ApplicationServers
Application
Application Servers
Data Store
Data Store

55. Spinning Up a Multi-Tier
Application

56. Create MySQL
server with
Amazon RDS

57. Launch 4 EC2
Micro Instances

58. Create an Elastic
Load Balancer

59. Add my instances
to the load
balancer

61. Database Scaling Scale Up CPU
Add Storage
Add Redundancy

62. Database Scaling – Add Read Replicas

63. Recovering From Failures
Auto-Healing and Auto-Scaling

64. Elastic Load Balancing
CloudWatch Auto Scaling

68. Create Launch Configuration
as-create-launch-config
MyConfig
--image-id ami-123456
--instance-type m1.small
--key jbarr-key
--group “Web and SSH”

69. Create Auto Scaling Group
as-create-auto-scaling-group
MyScalingGroup
--launch-configuration MyConfig
--availability-zones us-east-1a,us-east-1b
--min-size 5
--max-size 10
--load-balancers demo-load-balancer
Keep at least 5
and as many as 10
instances running!

70. Set Scaling Rules
as-create-or-update-trigger
CPUUtilization
DiskReadBytes
DiskReadOps
DiskWriteBytes
DiskWriteOps
NetworkIn
NetworkOut
FreeStorageSpace
ReadLatency
…

71. Summary
What We Have Seen and
Learned

72. What We Have Learned
Importance of high availability
Hosting assets on S3
Content distribution with
CloudFront
Web applications and EC2
Multi-tier application hosting
Database management with
RDS

73. Q&A

74. Thank You!