1. Choosing Our Spots
How Tapjoy Saves with Amazon Spot Pricing
®
Weston Jossey
November 13th, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.
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2. A Brief Introduction
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3. Who Am I?
• Engineer turned DevOps junkie
• Multiple Areas of Focus
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Performance
Cost Management & Reduction
Efficiency
As Needed Firefighter
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4. Tapjoy’s Challenge
• Premier Mobile Ad Network Across iOS & Android
• Global Network (435 Million Monthly Reach)
• Diverse user base (54% Male, 46% Female)
• Billions of requests per day
• Growth requires iteration, experimentation, and massive
scale
• Small mistakes are magnified to millions of consumers
instantly
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5. Scale Horizontally
Everywhere
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6. What Everyone Sees
1. Develop a killer product, hire more engineers
2. Expand product as fast as possible, gain market
share
3. Iterate, grow, refine, scale...
4. #Profit
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7. What Everyone Forgets to Mention
• Engineering is a game of tradeoffs. Fast growth
comes at a price.
• Testing and QA are often the first to lag behind.
• Building quality test beds for engineers can be
complicated.
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8. Food for Thought
• Where are your bottlenecks in your development
cycle?
• How do you simulate production?
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9. Spot Instances:
The Dremel of Engineering
®
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10. The Mindset Required
• Engineer application level redundancy and fault
tolerance.
• Spread yourself amongst many zones, potentially even
many regions.
• Identify areas of required, not preferred, persistence.
• Understand how your “neighbors” are utilizing your
preferred instance type.
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11. Always Be Testing
• Lots of engineering means...
• Lots of code pushes
• Lots of pull requests
• Lots of automated tests to be run frequently to prevent regressions
• Full test suites can take > 1 hour when run serially.
• Can slow down the review process when changes
require at minimum an hour lag for automated sign-off.
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12. Scale Horizontally With Spot Instances
• Jenkins + Spot Instances
• https://github.com/bwall/ec2-plugin
• Go wide during business hours, scale back in the
evenings. Automatically kicks online at 06:00ET
• Workers scale horizontally to support dozens of
simultaneous regression tests spread out over dozens
of workers
• Jenkins automatically guards against spot termination
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13. Tapinabox
• Born from Tapjoy Hackathon
• Quarterly hackathons to promote engineering growth and creativity.
• Question Posed: “What if spinning up a fresh QA was as easy as launching
a app server on Heroku?”
• Goals
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Behaves, operates, and performs like production.
Should be dead-simple to use. “Push a button, get a server.”
Save money through improved quality and low cost to operate.
End-To-End Product. No mocks, no stubs.
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14. Tapinabox Cont.
• Fully automated build & deployment process tied to a
developers Github account.
• Simple web interface for creating, managing, and
editing instances.
• Quick collaboration with Product Managers, remote
QA, and partner testing.
• Fully run on Spot Instances.
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17. How we Built Tapinabox
• Ruby on Rails
• AWS CLI
• Chef
• Amazon EC2 Spot Instances (zone & region agnostic)
• Tapjoy Slugs: Custom slug-deployments based on
FPM https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
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18. Pointers & Lessons Learned
• Spot Instances can take a while to provision with a different
workflow than a traditional on-demand model.
• Very important to find quiet zones / regions based on your
workload.
• Pricing sometimes takes a back seat to reliability. What
instance types have contention?
• Guard against termination with adequate pricing, but don’t try
and prevent it. Automation is key. The price will eventually fall.
• Pick the right tool for the job. Don’t get greedy!
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19. Kudos
• Tapjoy Automation Team
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John Russell
Chris Gerber
JLo
Adam Bell
Hugh Barrigan
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20. Thank You
weston.jossey@tapjoy.com
@dustywes
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21. Please give us your feedback on this
presentation
CPN207
As a thank you, we will select prize
winners daily for completed surveys!
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Thank You