At Adobe, we look at AWS Enterprise Support as our partners for success. With their help, we matured our use of AWS in many ways. This session details how AWS Support gave us insight into our AWS use and what we did to effect improvements. We're also making use of the Trusted Advisor SDK; we detail how we're building on top of that to drive further enhancements.

1. ENT206 – Using AWS Enterprise Support to
the Fullest
Simon Elisha, Principal Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Fergus Hammond, Senior Manager, Cloud Hosting, Adobe Systems Incorporated
November 14, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. CUSTOMER OBSESSION
…to be Earth’s most customer-centric company…

3. Constant Focus – Continually Striving to do Better

4. Choose the
level of
support
suitable for
your
business

5. Today we are
focussing on
Enterprise
Support

6. The Basics

7. Logging a Case
• Unlimited number of “named contacts”
• Ensure they have access via IAM
{
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"support:*"
],
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}

8. Choose your
preferred
method of
contact

9. Choose the Correct Severity Level
Severity
Level
Response
Time
Available For
Critical
15 minutes
Enterprise
Urgent
1 hour
Enterprise, Business
High
4 hours
Enterprise, Business
Normal
12 hours
Enterprise, Business, Developer
Low
1 day
Enterprise, Business, Developer
White glove case routing: Cases submitted by enterprise-level
customers will be recognized and routed directly to specially
trained engineers to ensure fast, accurate resolution to critical
issues.

10. Customer Story
Sometimes bad things happen to
good people…

11. Technical Account Manager (TAM)
• Focussed on your organization
• Regular, deep, and ongoing engagement
• Learns how you operate
–
–
–
–
Environment
Change control
Business challenges
Operational challenges
• Able to provide reports and analysis in your
preferred format

12. Types of TAM Deliverables
•
•
•
•
•
•
Monthly incident reporting
Proactive project planning
Cost optimization recommendations
In-flight project reviews
Feature requests
Etc.

13. It can be what you want it to be…
“Ran a tech summit for one of our
enterprise customers with a heavy
development focus where we tailored a
full day of workshops with themes
such as automation and deployment,
transcoding and IEM. A massive
turnout and really good feedback.”
TAM, Large Online Media Company

14. More Advanced Use

15. Architecture Support
• Access to a solutions architect
– Review new projects
– Explore use cases
– Design reviews
• Engage deeply with your organization to
understand your requirements and nuances
• Bring best practices, patterns, and advice

16. When it comes to support:
Reactive is the past; proactive
is the future.

17. Trusted Advisor

18. Cost Optimizing
• Reserved Instances
opportunities
• Underutilized EC2
instances
• Idle ELBs
• Underutilized
Amazon EBS
volumes
• Etc

19. Security
• Open ports
• IAM use
• Amazon S3
bucket
permissions
• Amazon RDS
security
• Etc

20. Fault Tolerance
• AZ imbalance
• Amazon EBS
snapshots
• ASG health
• VPN tunnels
• ELB configuration
• Etc

21. Performance
• Overutilized instances
• Amazon EBS PIOPS
settings
• Security group
proliferation
• Etc

22. Useful Way to Track Service Limits

23. AWS Support API

24. Support at the End of an API
myhost: aws support create-case …
myhost: aws support describe-cases …
myhost: aws support add-communication-to-case …
myhost: aws support resolve-case –-case-id <value>
myhost: aws support describe-trusted-advisor-check-summaries …
myhost: aws support refresh-trusted-advisor-check …

25. SDK Support to Make it Easier
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ruby
.NET
Java
Node.js
PHP
Python
CLI
PowerShell

26. Build Support “Your Way”
• Stealthy startup
– Uses the API to monitor their limits – dashboard on the “big
screen” in the office
• NZ company
– Tied AWS support tickets into their own trouble-tracking system.
• Your idea here…

27. Infrastructure Event
Management (IEM)

30. Create the “War Room”
• Short term, critical support for an event
–
–
–
–
–
Product launch
Advertising campaigns
Production rollouts
Public events (e.g. sports, music)
Cloud migration
• Zero-second response time
• Bring together all the key parties

31. The IEM Process
Initiation
•Introductions
•Architecture
review
•Cost planning
•Limits review
Planning &
Execution
•Assist customerled load testing
•Real-time event
support
Review &
Closure
• Post event analysis
and
recommendations

32. Customer Example
•
•
•
•
•
•
Large national “one time only” event
AWS chosen as backup for their existing solution
Team of 12 stakeholders
Reviewed architecture
Coordinated load test (12,000 rps)
During event, confidence so high that load was
shifted for a time to AWS and back again as a “proof
point”

33. ENT206 - Using AWS Enterprise Support to
the Fullest
Fergus Hammond, Senior Manager, Cloud Hosting, Adobe Systems Incorporated
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

34. The Short Story
• Enterprise support was must-have for Adobe
– Decision dictated by incident response process
• But Enterprise Support proved to be broadly useful,
beyond incident response
–
–
–
–
Architecture review of existing products
Guidance for new teams
Preparation for events
Trusted Advisor

35. About Adobe
• Global leader in digital media and digital marketing
solutions
• Provides tools to create, deploy, measure, and
optimize digital content

36. Cloud Products @ Adobe
• Creative Cloud
• Marketing Cloud
• Digital Publishing Suite
• PhoneGap
• Typekit
• Acrobat.com
• Behance
• Revel
• And growing via new products & acquisitions

37. History
• Photoshop.com image processing & hosting
• Low-cost hardware in colos; high availability via
application layer
• Omniture purchase in 2009
• Operations teams outside of IT run hosted apps

38. Adobe Creative Cloud
• Trends: mobile, social cloud
• Latest versions of desktop & mobile apps and
updates
• Cloud storage, syncing, and sharing
• Cloud services for building websites, apps,
publications
• Integration with Behance

39. How We Picked AWS
• Quickly!
• February 2011 decision > October 2011 launch of
Creative Cloud
• Pockets of existing AWS experience
• Aging hardware in colos, technology gaps (e.g.,
object storage), limited footprint
• It felt like the right time to make the jump into AWS

40. Shared Cloud
• Internal service platform for
product development
• Efficiency evolution: centralized
operation > centrally operated
PaaS
• Existing product teams
contribute workers, increasing
value of platform

41. How We Started
• New code base & key new hires with
AWS experience
• Using compute & storage; limited use of other
services
• With some incorrect assumptions…

42. What We Knew About AWS
• Elastic storage and compute
• Global footprint
• Low cost
• Run by invisible,
API-providing aliens

43. What Was Much Better Than We Thought
• Higher level services keep our focus on
differentiating our own products
• Higher level services enable infrastructure as code
• Services are added and improved at a rapid pace
• Amazon’s Enterprise Support offering is superb

44. Creative / Shared Cloud Architecture
• Multi-Availability Zone & multi-region
• Reserved Instances for baseline; on-demand for
peaks
• Three regions: US East, EU (Ireland), Asia
Pacific (Tokyo)
• Most AWS services in use
• Git, Jenkins, Chef, AWS CloudFormation
automate deployment & configuration
management

45. More on AWS Services
• Rock-solid base of elastic, API-provisioned compute
and storage at low cost
• Real value to Adobe is up the stack
– Higher level services make it easier for us to engineer our products
– Higher level services make it easier for us to deploy and operate our products
• Traditional virtualization & other public clouds make the
sysadmin’s job easier
• AWS replaces the sysadmin – infrastructure becomes
part of the code

46. Lessons Learned
• Multi-AZ architecture is essential for improving
availability
• Concerns about cost runaways are exaggerated
• AWS Enterprise Support is superb
– Consistent, knowledgeable, reliable, innovative
– Knows our product and is part of our team

47. How – And Why – We Use Enterprise Support
• Guidance for new AWS users
• Review of existing product architecture
• Dealing with disruptions
– Rare and impact usually small
– Essential for customer-facing / revenue generating service
– AWS technical staff seem like Adobe employees

48. Two Examples of Support Excellence
• Creative Cloud launch
– TAMs heavily involved in supporting launch; extended members of
Adobe team
– Provided recommendations that reduced risk
• Elastic Load Balancing pre-warming & Amazon S3 bucket partitioning
• Hurricane Sandy
– TAMs equipped with rain jackets & microphones
– Kept us informed on Virginia status
– Can’t overcommunicate when impact could be so large

49. Results and Next Steps
• Using AWS has resulted in lower cost, higher
availability, and reduced time-to-market
• AWS Enterprise Support is essential
• Planned expansion of Shared Cloud platform
• Growth of products already on Shared Cloud
• Greater use of Trusted Advisor (particularly re: RIs)

50. Because We All Have Our Own “Super Bowl”
"A large contributor to the success of Shazam’s Super Bowl event
was the work done beforehand with the help of AWS Enterprise
Support. Working hand in hand with a dedicated Technical
Account Manager, the support team provided real-time assistance,
ensuring our application would scale to meet the anticipated
demand of the event. In addition to the up-front support, the AWS
Enterprise Support team also provided around the clock
monitoring and assistance from the US and Europe during the
event and had AWS engineering resources on standby should
their assistance be required.”
Jason Titus, CTO, Shazam

51. Next Steps?
Visit the support portal
• aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport
Enquire or sign up
• aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/enterprise
Listen!
• aws.amazon.com/podcast

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presentation
ENT 206
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