Presentation by Paul Tepper Fisher and Rajiv Pant at the AWS Event in New York City on October 19, 2009. The presentation discusses the experiences and strategies Wired.com and reddit.com used to migrate IT infrastructure to EC2 and S3. Best Practices lessons learned are also presented.

1. Rajiv Pant / Paul Fisher VP Technology, Conde Nast Digital Revolution:Cloud , Co-Author www.revolutioncloud.com Manager of Technology, Wired.com Revolution:Cloud , Co-Author www.revolutioncloud.com www.revolutioncloud.com

2. Conde Nast Digital

3. Conde Nast websites

4. — About Wired.com High-Traffic Technology News Website Millions of Page Views each Day Numerous Site Components, implemented in Java, Grails, and PHP Many Disparate Features, including Admin, CMS, and User-Facing Functionality News Content, Product Reviews, Widgets, etc.

5. — About Wired.com

6. — Leveraging of EC2 Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets

7. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets — Leveraging of EC2

8. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets Dataset Wiki — Leveraging of EC2

9. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets Dataset Wiki — Leveraging of EC2

10. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets Dataset Wiki — Leveraging of EC2

11. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets Dataset Wiki — Leveraging of EC2

12. Rapid Prototyping and Deployment Wired Widgets Dataset Wiki Production CMS Components — Post-Process content and deploy images to S3 — Leveraging of EC2

13. These Projects utilized S3 and EC2 Rapid Development via Grails Production Deployment and integration with stack via CNAME Critical CMS Workflow Components Rely on S3 for content deployment and user-facing asset access. — Leveraging of EC2

14. Other Administrative Tools — Preparing and Editing Production Content Product Reviews Application Began as Simple Admin Tool Short Timeline and “In-Book” Deadline Selected EC2 to avoid delays — set-up production environment within a day — Leveraging of EC2

15. EC2 simplified Development and Staging Deployed and Tested application by duplicating image and environment Product Reviews Application posed integration challenges: Major Site Component Short Timeframe to Go Live — Leveraging of EC2

16. Product Reviews: Developed Admin Tool and User-Facing Application using Grails Integrated application via Proxying from internal hosting infrastructure Solution allowed us to leverage EC2 without limiting functionality or seamlessness of integration — Leveraging of EC2

17. Product Reviews: — Leveraging of EC2

18. Product Reviews: — Leveraging of EC2

19. Product Reviews: — Leveraging of EC2

20. Product Reviews — Admin Tool: — Leveraging of EC2

21. What is reddit? reddit is an online community

22. Timeline April 2006 -- S3 for logos September 2007 -- S3 for thumbnails November 2008 -- EC2 for batch processing May 2009 -- EC2 for entire site

23. What led us to AWS (part 1) Needed an easy way to distribute and upload our logo

25. What led us to AWS (part 2) Thumbnails!

26. What led us to AWS (part 3) Didn’t want to rent another cabinet

27. What led us to AWS (part 3) Didn’t want to rent another cabinet Didn’t want to buy more servers

28. What led us to AWS (part 3) Didn’t want to rent another cabinet Didn’t want to buy more servers New Servers New Servers

29. Imaging and Racking Servers Is A (Sometimes Fun) Chore

30. EC2 for Overflow Used openvpn to create a secure link to our datacenter for batch processing

31. Moving to EC2 Started by migrating all data

32. Moving to EC2 Started by migrating all data Got a complete stack running on EC2

33. Moving to EC2 Started by migrating all data Got a complete stack running on EC2 Long Saturday night finishing the migration and “forklifting” the last bits of data

34. Architecture

35. Stats 190 Virtual CPUs 338GB of RAM 9TB of Elastic Block Storage 2TB of S3 Storage 6.5 TB of Data Out / mo 2TB of Data In / mo 150M+ Pageviews and just one sysadmin!

36. Benefits Estimated Pricing Based on public Amazon pricing, reddit open source code, and public configuration information Data Center (per month) Servers: $6K Cabinet (x3): $15K Bandwidth: $2.5K Support: N/A Total: $23.5K EC2 (per month) Servers: $13K Storage: $1.5K Bandwidth: $1.1K Support: $1.2K Total: $16.8K 29% Cheaper!

37. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore

38. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore No racking or imaging servers anymore

39. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore No racking or imaging servers anymore Time to market is faster

40. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore No racking or imaging servers anymore Time to market is faster Multiple physical locations with AZs

41. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore No racking or imaging servers anymore Time to market is faster Multiple physical locations with AZs Get “free” upgrades

42. Benefits Don’t have to procure servers anymore No racking or imaging servers anymore Time to market is faster Multiple physical locations with AZs Get “free” upgrades Elasticity!

43. Pain Points

44. Pain Points

45. Pain Points Higher Latency Workaround: Fewer network calls, ask for more data at a time.

46. Pain Points EBS sometimes slows down a bit Workaround: Use caching and replication with read slaves to avoid relying on a single disk.

47. Pain Points Instances go away sometimes Workaround: Avoid single points of failure and make sure your servers have automated configuration.

48. Pain Points Fixing these issues made our app more reliable and highly available. We are better off than when we started.

49. Best Practices Keep data in multiple Availability Zones

50. Best Practices Keep data in multiple Availability Zones EBS for all persistent data

51. Best Practices Keep data in multiple Availability Zones EBS for all persistent data Snapshots

52. Best Practices Keep data in multiple Availability Zones EBS for all persistent data Snapshots No secret keys on the instance

53. Best Practices Keep data in multiple Availability Zones EBS for all persistent data Snapshots No secret keys on the instance Different functions in different Security Groups

54. Best Practices A full stack in each zone

55. Best Practices A full stack in each zone All data stored as key-value pairs

56. Best Practices A full stack in each zone All data stored as key-value pairs More use of queues

57. Conclusion AWS saves us a lot of money

58. Conclusion AWS saves us a lot of money AWS gives us a lot of flexibility

59. Conclusion AWS saves us a lot of money AWS gives us a lot of flexibility Moving to AWS has forced us to build better applications and follow better IT practices.

60. Conclusion AWS saves us a lot of money AWS gives us a lot of flexibility Moving to AWS has forced us to build better applications and follow better IT practices. http://code.reddit.com

61. Revolution: Cloud To learn more, visit http://www.revolutioncloud.com