aws summit amsterdam - thierry schellenbach founder/ fashiolista
DESCRIPTION
A short presentation about our experiences with AWS. It details our initial challenges with stability, costs and scalability and explains how we've overcome those hurdles. The Android example shows how Fashiolista was able to handle 5 times the normals requests by autoscaling its web, task and image resizing clusters. The most important benefits for us using AWS are: - Close to zero downtime - Low costs - Flexibility to rearrange our architecture - No upfront costs - Sysadmin is largely automated - Focus on productTRANSCRIPT
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!
[email protected]@tschellenbach
Github.com/tschellenbach/SnaptasticGithub.com/tschellenbach/FeedlyGithub.com/tbarbugli/cassandra_snapshotter