aws summit amsterdam - thierry schellenbach founder/ fashiolista

AWS experience

About Me

• Thierry Schellenbach• Founder Fashiolista• Github/tschellenbach• Github/Feedly & Django Facebook

• Blog: mellowmorning.com• @tschellenbach

Launched Fashiolista at TNW

Got a few hundred users

And went back to work

Brazil?!

• Blogs• Twitter• Capricho

• 2nd largest fashion community

Global Fashion Discovery

Challenges/ Why AWS

1. Rapid growth, colocation == pain

2. Focus on product3. Easily test new

infrastructure4. Handle peak load5. Replace first, debug

later

Growing pains

1. Stability issues

2. High costs (pre 12K, post 23K, now 9K),

3. Scaling challenges

Fixes for stability

1. Everything is code1. Cloud formation2. Puppet3. Fabric, BOTO, Snaptastic

2. Auto scaling groups for everything3. Deploy in minutes (tricky while auto scaling)

Keeping costs down

• Tag those instances!• Manage EBS volumes

properly(Snaptastic)

• Spot instances (lower auto scaling thresholds)

• S3 expiration policies

Scalability

1. Cassandra in the cloud(see high scalability post,bit.ly/1krex39)

2. Scalable newsfeedsGithub.com/tschellenbach/Feedly

3. Cassandra backup to S3Github.com/tbarbugli/cassandra_snapshotter

Android Example

Featured by Google• Requests/s times 5• Auto scaling kicked in

– Web 4 -> 12– Task workers 5 -> 15– Image resizing 2 -> 15

• No downtime, no missed sleep, happy users

Conclude

• Close to zero downtime• Costs are low at 9K monthly (2 million users)• Flexibility to rearrange architecture• No upfront costs• Sysadmin is largely automated• Focus on product

Get in touch!

thierryschellenbach@gmail.com@tschellenbach

Github.com/tschellenbach/SnaptasticGithub.com/tschellenbach/FeedlyGithub.com/tbarbugli/cassandra_snapshotter