New York Enterprise Collaboration Meet up

Dec 2nd 2015 Meetup No. 9wireless -MSFTOpen

Dec MeetupAzure vs AWS

www.sohodragon.nyc

AWS vs Azure Bakeoff

AWS by Eugene Y. Jen

Who I am

I am a software engineer for a long time, have worn different hats in my career.

I also worked in system administration on and off.

I built some interested software, unfortunately not open sourced.

I did some startups; one was close to be bought to join AWS before AWS launched then it failed through.

I had used AWS since 2007 on and off.

I am using AWS daily since 2014.

I have been in a project to do immutable deployment in AWS in last 2 years.

What I am going to present

Overview

The Goods

The Bads

The Uglies

Best way to get on board

Overview of AWS

It is an alphabet soup.

Luckily, AWS in Plain English

Launched officially in 2006 with S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud)

But SQS (Simple Queue Service) was launched in 2004 publicly.

EC2 was Linux focused. But it added support to Microsoft Windows later. and even FreeBSD.

Sorry no OS X

AWS built most of their services on top of EC2 and S3

Overview of AWS (cont 2/5)

EIP ( Elastic Ip Address )

EBS ( Elastic Block Store )

VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud )

IAM ( Identity and Access Management )

ELB ( Elastic Load Balancer )

RDS ( Relational Data Service ), MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, PostgresQL

DynamoDB

SimpleDB

ElasticCache: Memcached, Redis

Redshift: PostgresQL

Overview of AWS (cont 3/5)

Route 53

Elastic MapReduce

CloudFront

OpsWork

CodeDeploy

CloudWatch

Management Console

KMS ( Key Management Service )

CloudHSM

SES ( Simple Email Service )

Overview of AWS ( cont 4/5 )

SNS (Simple Notification Service )

Mechanical Turk

Machine Learning

Kinesis

Fulfillment

API Gateway

CloudSearch

ElasticSearch

Congito

Lambda

Elastic Beanstalk

Overview of AWS ( cont 5/5 )

Device Farms

FPS ( Flexible Payments Service )

DevPay

EFS

Glacier

Storage Gateway

DirectConnect

Inspector

CloudTrail

Service Catalog

Snowball

I think you have given up now

There are more services unlisted in previous slides.

AWS is keeping on adding new services

AWS is keeping on adding new features to existing products

AWS is keeping on fixing bugs

AWS is keeping on adding more data centers around the world see regions

What are those services and regions all about? A dream from a mad scientist?

Probably will be the largest distributed systemAWS is probably will be largest working distributed system

I maybe wrong. Maybe Google or Facebook has bigger distributed systems.

It serves Amazon.com itself

It serves a lot of Web traffic ( Netflix, AirBnB, Slack, FourSquare …)

So far, it seems like under pretty good leadership of Werner Vogels

It also starts to bring us to microservices based architecture due to AWS success. And success from Netflix as a customer start to encourage other companies to use AWS to build elastic scalable computing systems

AWS is the Cloud, just as Facebook/Google/Instagram/Twitter is Internet as 2015.

The Goods

Elasticity on resources

Elasticity is more than scalability.

Enable computing as utilities

Plan well, then it enables you to see the cost of your own services.

Plan well, then it also changse your company’s tax deduction ( From investment of capital expenditures of data centers to operating cost of AWS service charges )

Lambda, API Gateway

EC2 Beanstalk

The Goods ( cont )

Fully programmable

Enable infrastructure as code

Enable automated infrastructure operation

Enable immutable deployment

Enable reproducible infrastructures

Easier continuous delivery

You almost can build anything you can imagine

Enpower tech teams if plan well.

The Goods ( cont )

Variety of Services

Most services are derived from Amazon’s internal services.

New services and features on customer feedback

The Goods ( Cont )

A very large group of users

AWS re:Invent 2015: more than 10k attendees

A lot of code in Github that utilize AWS APIs.

The Goods ( Cont )

A lot of third party offerings

A lot of niche offering on management, monitoring, training, data analysis, IoT

The Goods ( cont )

Relative strong customer supports and training material

In NYC, A monthly meetup in AWS Pop-up Loft.

Relative well written documentation

A lot of videos and slides from past conference online, and you can spend time to learn from other pioneers that use AWS before you.

The BadsRelative expensive than hosting your own servers.

Your EC2 instances died

Relative complex in IAM configuration

Relative complex in Glacier policies

UDP packet lost is high

Cloud Formation config file is hard to maintained

VPC lacks some features to make peering easier

Most service are just good enough in comparison to other similar offering if you really want some good features.

AWS may steal your favorite service provider’s ideas and kill them

The Uglies

AWS is going to be the single point of success, especially in U.S.

I have not yet seen competitors’ offerings catching up

If you want to use AWS efficiently, you probably need to rewrite everything in your current stack.

Otherwise it is more expensive than running your service on other providers, such as Softlayers, Rackspace, Linode and Digital Ocean.

Or more expensive to run your own data centers if you are big as Facebook or Google

Do you trust Amazon with your data?

Migrating data out of AWS will be very expensive if your business are successful.

Best way to get on board

Move some of system to AWS and read the doc.

Depends who you are, and you need to change your ways of thinkings

C-level Management of existing software company

C-level Management of startups

Middle Management of existing software company

Developer/Engineer

System Admin/DevOps

Database Administrators

Data Scientists

C-Level Management of Existing Software

If you commit to migrate to AWS, being prepared for expenses increase in current software stack in the beginning.

You need to invest to retool your software stack to use AWS efficiently to reduce your cost

You need to invest your tech team to train them in AWS and learn basic distributed systems in computer science. So they will use the AWS well.

That means it may take years to reap benefits

Know your external dependencies.

C-Level Management of Startups

You probably should use Lambda and Beanstalk in the beginning.

Build MVP first.

You probably can scale up to EC2 later if the product is proven

Lambda probably saves you a lot of money in operations than salary to developers

Exploit the elasticity of AWS and services. Focus on your own product/service and lower operation cost.

Middle Management of existing software

Be sure to include cost of software rewriting / re-architect from existing software

Support you tech team to exploit elasticity to create continuous delivery pipeline for your own software

Train your tech team to learn AWS and distributed systems

Educate your product team to utilize the elasticity of computations in your own service and product to your customers and support tech team to build those

Use AWS to track down costs in your software systems and perform cost benefit analysis for product development

Encourage work smarter, instead of long hours.

Encourage experiments on changes.

Talk to your vendors

Developers/Engineers

Learn By Doing, trials and errors.

Learn basics of distributed system if you did not take course before in school.

Read some great papers in distributed computing / systems

Build micro service based system.

Build stateless workers

Avoid database schema spaghetti

Exploit Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery for your own good

Test driven development

You build it, you break it, you run it.

Be a good provider for self service model. Be a good customer to your service provider

System Administrators/DevOps

Infrastructure as code

Configuration Management may not be scalable. So use with caution.

Code and Configurations are artifact

Build continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline for your dev teams

Educate yourselfs for distributed systems

Monitoring

Build / Adopt tools for your tech teams

Build your service as self-service so it can scale

Don’t be the single point of success

Don’t overwork, work smart, think more and learn more.

Learn operational engineering and chaos engineering from Netflix

Database Administrators

You should now do frequent backup and restore exercises. There is no excuses of not doing those tasks due to you have a elastic database services in AWS.

Investigate how to migrate data among your environment in AWS to encourage better test driven development in your tech team.

You may not be able to tweak too much on AWS instances. But if you build a reproducible infrastructure, then you now can experiment on your databases without worrying screwing up critical company’s business.

Remove yourself from critical path and single point of success.

Data Scientists

Storage is cheap

Learn to script and reproducible experiment with source control

Exploit the elasticity in computing power

Learn how to move large data from S3 to your instances/containers

Learn to exploit EMR, RedShift, Beanstalk

Thanks

Thanks for my coworkers to review my slides

Daniel T. Kristjansson

Milen Pavlov

Ilya A. Sukhanov

Kulesh Shanmugasundaram

Aaron W. Harnly

Pratap Chand