1. Moving to Amazon Web
Services
And keeping it under control with
RightScale

3. Who am I?
• Mark Moline (@polloboy)
– Long time Internet developer:
research, software dev,
publishing, event photography
– Pre WWW
– PHP since v3

4. • Generate leads for online and traditional colleges and
universities
• Two primary public-facing sites:
– AchieveYourCareer.com
– FindYourDegree.com
• Numerous B2B portals
• Custom Matching Algorithms to
find best fit for students
• Targeted high-volume campaigns

5. What will we talk about?
• Typical web application deployment
architectures
• Challenges and problems
• AWS / RightScale / Zend components
• Our solution
• Other considerations
• Alternative Solutions

6. How do your applications grow?
• All-in-One
Apache
PHP
Session Files MySQL DB

7. How do your applications grow?
• Separate DB Server
Apache
PHP
Session Files
MySQL Server

8. How do your applications grow?
• Typical multi-server load balanced app
Load Balancer
MySQL Server

9. Challenges
• Main Issues
– Sessions
• Scale up and down
– DB Scaling
• Replication, backups, failover
• Other Areas
– HA Sessions
– HA DB
– Caching

10. The Old Way
• Organically grown, single monolithic server.
• Entire app on one box.
• In-house SVN for source code
• S3 for backups
Apache SVN
PHP
Session Files MySQL DB
S3

11. Problems
• No room for traffic bursts
• FRAGILE – Don’t want to upgrade X
because it may break Y
• Single point of failure – could bring
business down for hours or possibly days
• Encouraged manual hacking instead of
best practices. “It’s OK, I’ll just edit this file
on the live server…”

12. http://aws.amazon.com/products
• Servers: EC2
– Various sizes (and prices) from 613MB + 2EC2 Compute Units
to 68.4GB + 26EC2 Compute Units
– Compute unit approx 1.7GHz Xeon or 1.2GHz Opteron ca 2007
• Storage: S3 and EBS
– S3: static files, can link to Cloud Front for CDN, very high
availability and reliability
– EBS: disk storage for your EC2 instances
• Database: RDS
– Cloud version of MySQL – works but not very tuneable
– Great for quick tests and very standard applications
– Usually better to put your own MySQL installation on a dedicated EC2 instance
– Plenty of others including NoSQL, Dynamo DB, Key/Value store…
• Load Balancing, DNS, Queueing, Messaging, workflows,

13. • RightScale manages your AWS (or other
cloud) instances for you.
• Monitoring and relaunch on crash
• Scale up/down based on defined metrics
• Pre-built server templates ready for use or
customization

14. RightScale Server Templates and Deployments
• Start with AWS EC2
instance
• Run a series of shell
scripts to install and
build needed services
• Everything scripted from
standard inputs
• Easy to customize and
extend. Essential.
• Revision Control with
commit and rollback for
scripts and templates
and deployments.

15. Zend Server Cluster Manager
• Pre-configured Zend PHP architecture
• Based on industry best practices
• Auto-scaling based on system and
application load metrics, supported by
load balancing
• PHP session clustering for high
availability
• Redundant database with snapshots,
failover, and recovery
• Caching
• Code tracing / debugging
• In Zend Server 5.6 also get deployment

16. How our little big system grew

17. Benefits
• No more single point of (disastrous) failure
• MySQL master/slave replication and EBS
Snapshot backups “just work”
• Better reliability because everything is
scripted. No more manual build processes
• Easy to clone and test new configs
• Testing environment identical to production
• Flexibility to change architecture as needed
• Increased capacity, of course

18. Other Considerations
• Test your failover strategy – Chaos
Monkey
• Document your process – in-house wiki
• Move source out of house
• Leverage Amazon Cloud Front for CDN
• Keep S3 secure – keys and ACLs
• Buy reserved instances as soon as
possible
• Keep “warm” spare in a different cloud

19. Alternatives?
• Cloud:
– Rackspace, SoftLayer, Eucalyptus,
CloudStack, more every day
• Management:
– Eucalyptus
– Scalr.net
– Enstratus
• App Server
– Roll your own…

20. Roll Your Own?
• Host Your Web Site in the Cloud – Jeff Barr
• Programming Amazon Web Services – James Murty
• Programming Amazon EC2 – Jurg van Vliet, Flavia Paganelli

21. Q&A
• Questions?
• Mark Moline
@polloboy
mark.moline@gmail.com