A presentation that investigates strategies and tools for high availability in Amazon Web Services. This is appropriate for systems administrators and cloud architects, along with anyone else looking to get started with or improve their knowledge of HA design in AWS.

1. https://www.adair.tech
HIGH AVAILABILITY IN AWS
BRAD ADAIR
AWS CERTIFIED SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT

2. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
INTRODUCTION
ABOUT ME
▸ President of Adair Technology, LLC.
▸ IT infrastructure consulting. Specializing in
cloud architecture and implementation.
▸ Many years of experience with systems
administration and architecture and cloud
administration and architecture.

3. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS BEING COVERED
▸ Thinking about HA in the cloud.
▸ Various strategies.
▸ What is best for you.
▸ What are the things you need to put in place for each
design.
▸ What tools and services can be used to meet those needs
▸ Q & A.

4. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
HA IN THE CLOUD
▸ Many similarities to on-premise HA design.
▸ Redundancy
▸ Replication
▸ Backups
▸ Monitoring

5. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
HA IN THE CLOUD
▸ Many differences as well
▸ Scale
▸ Speed
▸ Access
▸ Resources

6. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
THREE PRIMARY STRATEGIES
▸ Fully redundant systems.
▸ Partially redundant setups.
▸ “Reconstructable” setups.

7. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
FULLY REDUNDANT SYSTEMS
▸ Straightforward.
▸ Have multiple of everything.
▸ Replicate all databases.
▸ Sync all file systems.
▸ Expensive.
▸ Time consuming.
▸ Complex.
▸ Usually not needed.

8. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
PARTIALLY REDUNDANT SYSTEMS
▸ More complex.
▸ Requires more upfront planning.
▸ Determine what is essential and what is not.
▸ Replicate only what you have to.
▸ More cost effective.
▸ Less complex.
▸ Fits quite a few use cases.

9. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
“RECONSTRUCTABLE” SYSTEMS
▸ No active redundancy.
▸ No replication or syncing.
▸ Good backups of data are essential.
▸ Takes upfront setup work.
▸ Cheap.
▸ Requires good change management and version control processes.
▸ Has longer recovery times than other options.

10. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
THINKING ABOUT HA IN THE CLOUD
THREE FOUR PRIMARY STRATEGIES
▸ Fully redundant setups.
▸ Partially redundant setups.
▸ “Reconstructable” setups.
▸ Hybrid “reconstructable” + partially redundant
setups.

11. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
FULLY REDUNDANT SETUPS
STRATEGY
▸ Straightforward.
▸ Make 2 or more of everything.
▸ Multiple availability zones and regions.

12. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
FULLY REDUNDANT SETUPS
TOOLS
▸ Multiple region VPC peering.
▸ Transit VPC.
▸ VPNs/Customer Gateways/CSRs.
▸ RDS for Aurora or MySQL Databases.
▸ EFS filesystems.
▸ Backups are a concern.
▸ Scripts to help with that.
▸ Route53 for DNS
▸ Failover/Distributed/Geo.

13. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
PARTIALLY REDUNDANT SETUPS
STRATEGY
▸ Identify the most critical pieces of
infrastructure.
▸ Likely going to be databases.
▸ Have one or more duplicates in other
availability zones and/or regions.
▸ Replicate that data.

14. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
PARTIALLY REDUNDANT SETUPS
TOOLS
▸ RDS for Aurora or MySQL databases. EC2
instances for other databases.
▸ EFS if needed.
▸ Route 53 in a failover mode.
▸ Cross region VPC peering.

15. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
“RECONSTRUCTABLE” SETUPS
STRATEGY
▸ Do not duplicate anything.
▸ Have excellent and up to date backups.
▸ Have all of your infrastructure defined in code and
images.
▸ In case of emergency, reconstruct the infrastructure
quickly and with little thought or planning needed.

16. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
“RECONSTRUCTABLE” SYSTEMS
TOOLS
▸ Terraform
▸ CloudFormation
▸ Packer
▸ AMI
▸ Auto-scaling groups
▸ Lambda
▸ CloudWatch
▸ New Relic/DataDog/Pingdom/Etc
▸ S3

17. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
HYBRID SETUPS
STRATEGY
▸ Duplicate data
▸ Databases
▸ Shared file systems
▸ Do not duplicate compute/network/etc.
▸ Quickly spin up new compute/network/etc. in
response to issues.

18. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
HYBRID SETUPS
TOOLS
▸ Terraform
▸ CloudFormation
▸ Packer
▸ AMI
▸ Auto-scaling groups
▸ Lambda
▸ CloudWatch
▸ New Relic/DataDog/Pingdom/Etc
▸ S3

19. EXAMPLES

20. https://www.adair.tech Adair Technology, LLC
CONTACT ME
▸ Website: https://www.adair.tech
▸ Email: brad@adair.tech
▸ Twitter: @bpadair

21. QUESTIONS?