In this session, we walk through building and deploying a global-scale, multi-region, active-active serverless backend using Amazon Route 53 to route the traffic among AWS Regions, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda for the backend, and Amazon DynamoDB global tables for handling data storage at a global scale. We provide a demo and a hands-on coding opportunity.

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Best Practices for Building Multi-region,
Active-active Serverless Application
Adrian Hornsby
Technical Evangelist
Amazon Web Services
S R V 4 2 5

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Breakout repeats
Wednesday
Best Practices for Building Multi-Region, Active-Active Serverless Applications
2:30 PM - Venetian, Level 2, Venetian H
Friday
Best Practices for Building Multi-Region, Active-Active Serverless Applications
10:00 AM - Mirage, Antigua A

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Before we get started, let’s take a look at some
fundamentals.

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About availability
Availability Downtime per year
99% (2-nines) 3 days 15 hours
99.9% (3-nines) 8 hours 45 minutes
99.99% (4-nines) 52 minutes
99.999% (5-nines) 5 minutes
99.9999% (6-nines) 31 seconds

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Availability in series
Part X Part Y
A = Ax Ay

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Availability in series
Component Availability Downtime
X 99% (2-nines) 3 days 15 hours
Y 99.99% (4-nines) 52 minutes
X and Y Combined 98.99% 3 days 16 hours 33 minutes

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Availability in parallel
A = 1 – (1 – Ax)2
Part X
Part X

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Availability in parallel
Component Availability Downtime
X 99% (2-nines) 3 days 15 hours
Two X in parallel 99.99% (4-nines) 52 minutes
Three X in parallel 99.9999% (6-nines) 31 seconds

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Component redundancy increases availability
significantly!

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18 Geographic Regions
55 Availability Zones (AZs)
4 regions and 12 more Availability Zones announced

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AWS Region and Availability Zones
Region
Availability Zone a Availability Zone b Availability Zone c
data center
data center
data center
data center
data center
data center
data center
data center
data center

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Multi-AZ architecture
Region
Availability zone a Availability zone b Availability zone c
Application

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Serverless components
Region
Availability zone a Availability zone b Availability zone c
Serverless Components

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No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Availability and fault tolerance
built in
Why serverless components??

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Why build a multi-region active-active
architecture?

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Improve latency for end-users

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Disaster recovery
Applications in
US West
Applications in
US East
Users from
San Francisco
Users from
New York
Service 1
Service 2
Service 3
Service 4
Service 1
Service 2
Service 3
Service 4

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Customers doing multi-region active-active
architecture?

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Netflix 2013

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Netflix 2016

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Prerequisites to building a multi-region
architecture.

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CAP Theorem
Consistency Availability Partition Tolerance
Data is consistent.
All nodes see the same state.
Every request is non-failing. Service still responds as expected
if some nodes crash.
Distributed System
In the presence of a network partition, you
must choose between consistency and
availability!

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Embrase eventual consistency
… if no new updates are made to a
given data item, eventually all
accesses to that item will return
the last updated value.
Availability
An eventually consistent system can
return any value before it converges!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency
Distributed System
Every request is non-failing.

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Secure and reliable global network

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Global routing

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Routing policies with Route 53
RegionRegion
Application Application

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Latency based routing
RegionRegion
Application Application

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Geo-based routing
Region us-east-1Region us-west-2
Application Application

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Weighted round robin routing
Region us-east-1Region us-west-2
Application Application

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DNS failover
Region us-east-1Region us-west-2
Application Application

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
https://globalddb.adhorn.me
Regional
API
Endpoint
Custom
Domain
Name
Regional
API
Endpoint
Custom
Domain
Name
API Gateway

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Build high performance, globally distributed applications
Low latency reads & writes to locally available tables
Disaster proof with multi-region redundancy
Easy to set up and no application rewrites required
Globally dispersed users
Replica (N. America)
Replica (Europe)
Replica (Asia)
Global App
Global Table
Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables
Fully managed, multi-master, multi-region database

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Amazon S3 cross-region replication
Bucket with
objects
Bucket with
objects

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Multi-region multi-VPC connectivity
Region Region
VPC VPC
VPC
VPC
VPC
VPC
Peering
Amazon Backbone
Peering
https://aws.amazon.com/answers/networking/aws-multiple-region-multi-vpc-connectivity/

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Testing multi-region architecture.

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GameDay at Amazon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoz0ZjfrQ9s

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Chaos engineering
https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
Global Table
https://globalddb.adhorn.me

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
Global Table

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
Global Table

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
Global Table

52. Amazon Route 53: Traffic Policy

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Health checks with Route 53

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Shallow health check
Instance
Cache node
Email
database
Cluster
Are you healthy?
yes

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Shallow health check
Instance
Cache node
Email
database
Cluster
Are you healthy?
yes

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Deep health check
Instance
Cache node
Email
database
Cluster
Are you healthy?
yes
Are you healthy?
yes
yes
yes
yes

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Deep health check
Instance
Cache node
Email
database
Cluster
Are you healthy?
no
Are you healthy?
no
yes
yes
yes

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Region us-east-1
Region us-west-2
Global Table
https://globalddb.adhorn.me
Voilà!

59. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Adrian Hornsby
@adhorn

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