Learn about the patterns and techniques a business should be using in building their infrastructure on Amazon Web Services to be able to handle rapid growth and success in the early days. From leveraging highly scalable AWS services, to architecting best patterns, there are a number of smart choices you can make early on to help you overcome some typical infrastructure issues.

2. Scaling on AWS for the First 10 Million Users
• ME: Chris Munns – Solutions Architect – Amazon Web
Services – munns@amazon.com
• YOU: Here to learn more about scaling infrastructure
on AWS
• TODAY: about best practices and things to think about
when building for large scale

3. So how do we scale?

6. a lot of things to read

7. not where we want to start
a lot of things to read

8. Auto-Scaling is a tool and a
destination. It’s not the
single thing that fixes
everything.

9. What do we need first?

10. Some basics:

11. US-WEST (Oregon)
EU-WEST (Ireland)
ASIA PAC (Tokyo)
US-WEST (N. California)
SOUTH AMERICA (Sao Paulo)
US-EAST (Virginia)
AWS GovCloud (US)
ASIA PAC
(Sydney)
Regions
ASIA PAC
(Singapore)

12. US-WEST (Oregon)
EU-WEST (Ireland)
ASIA PAC (Tokyo)
US-WEST (N. California)
SOUTH AMERICA (Sao Paulo)
US-EAST (Virginia)
AWS GovCloud (US)
ASIA PAC
(Sydney)
Availability Zones
ASIA PAC
(Singapore)

13. • $5.2B retail business
• 7,800 employees
• A whole lot of servers
Every day, AWS adds enough
server capacity to power that
whole $5B enterprise

14. Compute Storage
AWS Global Infrastructure
Database
App Services
Deployment & Administration
Networking

15. Compute Storage
AWS Global Infrastructure
Database
App Services
Deployment & Administration
Networking
Amazon
CloudWatch AWS IAM AWS
CloudFormation
Amazon Elastic
Beanstalk
AWS
Data
Pipeline
AWS
OpsWorks
Amazon
CloudSearch
Amazon SQSAmazon
SNS
Amazon
Elastic
Transcoder
Amazon SWF
Amazon SES
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon RDS
Amazon
ElastiCache
Amazon
RedShift
AWS Storage
Gateway
Amazon S3
Amazon
Glacier
Amazon
CloudFrontAmazon
EC2
Amazon
EMR
Amazon
VPC
Amazon
Route 53
AWS
Direct
Connect

16. So let’s start from day
one, user one ( you ):

17. Day One, User One:
• A single EC2 Instance
– With full stack on this host
• Web App
• Database
• Management
• etc
• A single Elastic IP
• Route53 for DNS
EC2
Instance
Elastic IP
Amazon
Route 53
User

18. “We’re gonna need a bigger box”
• Simplest approach
• Can now leverage PIOPs
• High I/O instances
• High Memory instances
• High CPU instances
• High storage instances
• Easy to change instance sizes
• Will hit an endpoint eventually
hi1.4xlarge
m2.4xlarge
m1.small

19. Day One, User One:
• We could potentially get
to a few hundred to a few
thousand depending on
application complexity
and traffic
• No failover
• No redundancy
• Too many eggs in one
basket
EC2
Instance
Elastic IP
Amazon
Route 53
User

20. Day Two, User >1:
First lets separate out
our single host into
more than one.
• Web
• Database
– Make use of a database
service?
Web
Instance
Database
Instance
Elastic IP
Amazon
Route 53
User

21. Self-Managed Fully-Managed
Database Server
on Amazon EC2
Your choice of
database running on
Amazon EC2
BringYour Own
License (BYOL)
Amazon
DynamoDB
Managed NoSQL
database service
using SSD storage
Seamless
scalability Zero
administration
Amazon RDS
Microsoft SQL,
Oracle or MySQL as
a managed service
Flexible licensing
BYOL or License
Included
Amazon
Redshift
Massively parallel,
petabyte-scale,
data warehouse
service
Fast, powerful and
easy to scale
Database Options

22. But how do I choose
what DB technology I
need? SQL? NoSQL?

23. Some folks won’t like
this. But…

24. Start with SQL
databases

25. But, but, but, but…

26. No.You don’t.

27. Start with SQL
databases

28. Why start with SQL?
• Established and well worn technology
• Lots of existing code, communities, books,
background, tools, etc
• You aren’t going to break SQL DBs in your first 10
million users. No really, you won’t*
• Clear patterns to scalability
*Unless you are doing something SUPER weird with the data or
MASSIVE amounts of it, even then SQL will have a place in your stack

29. AH HA! You said “massive
amounts”, I will have
massive amounts!

30. If your usage is such that you
will be generating several TB(
>5 ) of data in the first year OR
have an incredibly data
intensive work load you might
need NoSQL

31. But this is probably
less than 90% of you

32. User >100:
First lets separate out
our single host into
more than one.
• Web
• Database
– Use RDS to make your life
easier
Web
Instance
Elastic IP
RDS DB
Instance
Amazon
Route 53
User

33. User > 1000:
Next let’s address our
lack of failover and
redundancy issues:
• Elastic Load Balancer
• Another Web instance
– In another Availability Zone
• Enable RDS Multi-AZ
Web
Instance
RDS DB Instance
Active (Multi-AZ)
Availability Zone Availability Zone
Web
Instance
RDS DB Instance
Standby (Multi-AZ)
Elastic Load
Balancer
Amazon
Route 53
User

34. • Create highly scalable applications
• Distribute load across EC2 instances
in multiple availability zones
Feature Details
Available Load balance across instances in multiple
Availability Zones
Health checks Automatically checks health of instances and
takes them in or out of service
Session stickiness Route requests to the same instance
Secure sockets layer Supports SSL offload from web and application
servers with flexible cipher support
Monitoring Publishes metrics to CloudWatch
Elastic Load
Balancer
Elastic Load Balancing

35. Scaling this horizontally
and vertically here will
get us pretty far
( 10s-100s of thousands )

36. User >10ks-100ks:
RDS DB Instance
Active (Multi-AZ)
Availability Zone Availability Zone
RDS DB Instance
Standby (Multi-AZ)
Elastic Load
Balancer
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Amazon
Route 53
User

37. This will take us pretty far
honestly, but we care about
performance and efficiency,
so lets clean this up a bit

38. Shift some load around:
Let’s lighten the load on
our web and database
instances a bit:
• Move static content from
webs to S3 and CloudFront
• Move session/state and DB
caching to ElastiCache or
DynamoDB
Web
Instance
RDS DB Instance
Active (Multi-AZ)
Availability Zone
Elastic Load
Balancer
Amazon S3
Amazon
Cloudfront
Amazon
Route 53
User
ElastiCache
DynamoDB

39. Working with S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service
• Object based storage for the web
• 11 9s of durability
• Good for things like:
– Static assets ( css, js, images,
videos )
– Backups
– Logs
– Ingest of files for processing
• “Infinitely scalable”
• Supports fine grained permission
control
• Ties in well with CloudFront
• Ties in with EMR
• Acts as a logging endpoint for
S3/CloudFront/Billing
• Supports Encryption at transit and at
rest
• Reduced Redundancy 1/3 cheaper
• Glacier for super long term storage

40. DynamoDB
• Provisioned throughput NoSQL
database
• Fast, predictable performance
• Fully distributed, fault tolerant
architecture
• Considerations for non-uniform
data
Feature Details
Provisioned
throughput
Dial up or down provisioned
read/write capacity.
Predictable
performance
Average single digit millisecond
latencies from SSD-backed
infrastructure.
Strong
consistency
Be sure you are reading the
most up to date values.
Fault tolerant Data replicated across
Availability Zones.
Monitoring Integrated to CloudWatch.
Secure Integrates with AWS Identity
and Access Management (IAM).
Elastic
MapReduce
Integrates with Elastic
MapReduce for complex
analytics on large datasets.

41. ElastiCache
• Hosted Memcached
– Speaks same API as traditional open source
memcached
• Scale from one to many nodes
• Self healing ( replaces dead instance )
• Very fast ( single digit ms speeds usually (or less) )
• Local to a single AZ
– So need to run different clusters across different Azs
• Data is only in memory, so not persistent
• Use AWS’s Auto Discovery client to simplify clusters
growing and shrinking without affecting your application

42. Now that our Web tier is
much more light weight, we
can revisit the beginning of
our talk..

43. Auto-Scaling!

44. Automatic resizing of compute
clusters based on demand
Trigger auto-scaling
policy
Feature Details
Control Define minimum and maximum instance pool
sizes and when scaling and cool down occurs.
Integrated to Amazon
CloudWatch
Use metrics gathered by CloudWatch to drive
scaling.
Instance types Run Auto Scaling for On-Demand and Spot
Instances. Compatible with VPC.
as-create-auto-scaling-group MyGroup
--launch-configuration MyConfig
--availability-zones us-east-1a
--min-size 4
--max-size 200
Auto-Scaling
Amazon
CloudWatch

45. Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Typical weekly traffic to Amazon.com

46. Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Typical weekly traffic to Amazon.com
Provisioned capacity

47. November traffic to Amazon.com
November

48. November traffic to Amazon.com
Provisioned capacity
November

49. November traffic to Amazon.com
76%
24%
Provisioned capacity
November

50. November traffic to Amazon.com
November

51. Auto-Scaling lets you do this!

52. There’s further
improvements to be made
in breaking apart our
web/app layer more

53. SOA = Service Oriented Architecture

54. SOA’ing
Move services into their own
tiers/modules.Treat each of
these as 100% whole-y separate
pieces of your infrastructure and
scale them independently.
Amazon.com and AWS do this
extensively! It offers flexibility
and greater understanding of
each component

55. Loose coupling sets you free!
• The looser they're coupled, the bigger
they scale
– Independent components
– Design everything as a black box
– Decouple interactions
– Favor services with built in redundancy and
scalability than building your own
Controller A Controller B
Controller A Controller B
Q Q
Tight Coupling
Use Amazon SQS as Buffers
Loose Coupling

56. Loose coupling + SOA = winning
In the early days, if someone has a service for
it already, opt to use that instead of building it
yourself. DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL
Examples:
• Email
• Queuing
• Transcoding
• Search
• Databases
• Monitoring
• Metrics
• Logging
Amazon
CloudSearch
Amazon SQSAmazon SNS
Amazon Elastic
Transcoder
Amazon SWF
Amazon SES

57. On re-inventing the wheel: if
you find yourself writing
your own: queue, DNS
server, database, storage
system, monitoring tool

58. Take a deep breath and stop
it. Now.

59. Back to SOA

60. Imagine we let our users
upload photos

61. S3 Bucket
For Ingest
User
SNS Topic
RRS S3
Bucket to
Serve
content to
CloudFront
S3 Bucket
For
originals
CloudFront
Download
Distribution
SQS Queue
Size for Thumbnail
SQS Queue
Size Image for
Mobile
SQS Queue
Size Image for Web
Auto scaling
Group
Instances
Auto scaling
Group
Instances
Auto scaling
Group
Instances

62. User >1mil+:
Reaching a million and above is going to require some bit
of all the previous things:
• Multi-AZ
• Elastic Load Balancer between tiers
• Auto-Scaling
• Service oriented architecture
• Serving content smartly ( S3/CloudFront )
• Caching off DB
• Moving state off tiers that auto-scale

63. User >1mil+:
RDS DB Instance
Active (Multi-AZ)
Availability Zone
Elastic Load
Balancer
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
RDS DB Instance
Read Replica
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Web
Instance
Amazon
Route 53
User
Amazon S3
Amazon
Cloudfront
DynamoDB
Amazon SQS
ElastiCache
Worker
Instance
Worker
Instance
Amazon
CloudWatch
Internal App
Instance
Internal App
Instance
Amazon SES

64. The next big steps

65. User >5mil – 10mil:
You’ll potentially start to run into issues with your
database around contention on the write master.
How can you solve it?
• Federation ( splitting into multiple DBs based on
function)
• Sharding ( splitting one data set up across multiple
hosts)
• Moving some functionality to other types of DBs (
NoSQL )

66. Database Federation
• Split up Databases by
function/purpose
• Harder to do cross function
queries
• Essentially delaying the need
for something like
sharding/NoSQL until much
further down the line
• Won’t help with single huge
functions/tables
ForumsDB
UsersDB
ProductsDB

67. Sharded Horizontal Scaling
• More complex at the
application layer
• ORM support can help
• No practical limit on scalability
• Operation
complexity/sophistication
• Shard by function or key space
• RDBMS or NoSQL
User ShardID
002345 A
002346 B
002347 C
002348 B
002349 A
A
B
C

68. User >5mil – 10mil:
You’ll potentially start to run into issues with speed and
performance of your applications.
• Need to make sure you have
monitoring/metrics/logging in place
– If you can’t build it internally, out source it! ( 3rd party SaaS )
• Pay attention to what customers are saying works well
vs what doesn’t
• Really try to work on squeezing as much performance
out of each service/component

69. HOST
LEVEL
METRICS
AGGREGATE
LEVEL
METRICS
LOG
ANALYSIS
EXTERNAL
SITE
PERFORMANCE

70. Not having proper
monitoring/metrics is like
flying a plane with an eye mask
on in a thunderstorm. Oh and
your wing is on fire.

71. AWS Marketplace & Partners can help
• Customer can find, research, buy
software
• Simple pricing, aligns with EC2 usage
model
• Launch in minutes
• Marketplace billing integrated into your
AWS account
• 700+ products across 20+ categories
Learn more at: aws.amazon.com/marketplace

72. User >5mil – 10mil:
Managing your infrastructure will become an ever
increasing important part of your time. Use tools to
automate repetitive tasks.
• Tools to manage AWS resources
• Tools to manage software and configuration on your
instances
• Automated data analysis of logs and user actions

73. AWS Application Management Solutions
Elastic Beanstalk OpsWorks CloudFormation EC2
Convenience Control
Higher-level Services Do it yourself

74. Host based Configuration Management
Two big players:
– Opscode Chef
– PuppetLabs Puppet
• Both do more or less the same thing
• Both have syntax that isn’t too dissimilar
• Use these one of these along side one of the tools
from the previous slide
• Spend the time required to learn them
• Can’t scale easily with out something like this

75. A quick review:

76. • Multi-AZ your infrastructure
• Make use of self scaling services ( ELB, S3, SNS, SQS, SWF,
SES, etc )
• Build in redundancy at every level.
• Start SQL. Seriously.
• Move to NoSQL if it really makes sense
• Leverage managed/low touch services
• Split tiers into individual services ( SOA )
• Use Auto-scaling once you’re ready to
• Use automation tools in your infrastructure
• Make sure you have good metrics/monitoring/logging tools
in place
• Don’t reinvent the wheel

77. Putting all this together
means we should now easily
be able to handle 10+
million users!

78. To infinity…..

79. User >10mil:
A lot of what we covered today will
get you potentially into the high 10s of
millions. Iterating on top of the
patterns seen here will get you up and
over 100 million users.

80. User >10mil:
• More fine tuning of your application
• More SOA of features/functionality
• Going from Multi-AZ to Multi-Region
• Needing to start potentially building
custom solutions
• Deep analysis of your whole stack

81. Next steps?
READ! –
• aws.amazon.com/documentation
• aws.amazon.com/architecture
• aws.amazon.com/start-ups

82. Next steps?
START USING AWS –
aws.amazon.com/free/

83. Next steps?
ASK FOR HELP!
• forums.aws.amazon.com
• aws.amazon.com/support
Your local account manager!

84. THANKS F0R LISTENING!
Chris Munns - munns@amazon.com