ARC210_Building Scalable Multi-Tenant Email Sending Programs

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Building Scalable Multi-Tenant Email Sending
Programs
Best practices for building and monitoring multi-tenant solutions using Amazon Simple Email Service
A R C 2 1 0
Melvin Ram, Zendesk
Kadir Rathnavelu, AWS Messaging and Targeting
November 27, 2017

AGENDA
Amazon SES Multitenant Solution Overview
Monitoring and Enforcing Compliance on Individual Accounts
The Zendesk Journey with Using Amazon SES

CHALLENGES WITH EMAIL SENDING
• Delivery of email to your recipient’s inbox is hard
• Managing the complaint feedback loop is complex
• The undifferentiated heavy lifting of setting up an email infrastructure

CHALLENGES IN A MULTITENANT ENVIRONMENT
• Tenants can be unique businesses or internal teams
• Maturity of the tenants varies widely
• Do you trust them?
• Do they have good lists?
• Companies have to build safeguards to prevent an unsophisticated
sender or a bad actor from impacting the sending of others
• It is hard to measure the sending quality and enforce compliance in real
time

AMAZON SES MULTITENANT SOLUTION OVERVIEW

FOCUS ON HIGH-VOLUME SENDERS
• Eight significant features in 2017 and nearly all of them targeted at
high-volume senders
• Improvements to Configuration Sets
• Open and Clicks
• Dedicated IP Pools
• Automatic warm-up of Dedicated IPs
• Bulk send personalized emails
• Reputation Dashboard

CONFIGURATION SETS
• Configuration sets are groups of rules; when you apply a configuration set to an
email, all of the rules in that configuration set are applied to the email
• You can use it to provide different experiences for their tenants
• Improvements:
• Ability to track open and clicks
• Customize the domain you want to use for open and click tracking
• Amazon SNS as a channel in addition to Amazon Kinesis Firehose and
Amazon CloudWatch
• Specify the sending IPs for the email

DEDICATED IPS AND IP POOLS
• When you send email using dedicated IP addresses, the sender reputation of
these addresses is based solely on your email sending practices
• You can use the dedicated IP pools feature to create groups (pools) of those IP
addresses
• You can then associate each pool with a configuration set
• Hidden feature: you can send emails through dedicated IPs and shared IPs from
the same account

Bulk Email Sending
• You can use email templates to create the structure of an email that you plan to
send to multiple recipients, or that you will use again in the future.
• Two APIs to send emails using the templates:
• Use SendTemplatedEmail to send email to a single destination
• Use SendBulkTemplatedEmail to send emails to up to 50 unique recipients

REPUTATION DASHBOARD
• Accounts with excessively high bounce or complaint rates may be placed on
probation or suspended
• Reputation Dashboard helps you track these metrics
• Overall account status
• Bounce rates
• Complaint rates
• Spamtraps
• You can use configuration sets to track individual streams of emails (that is, a
unique tenant or a group of email addresses)
• Using the pause feature, you can pause the offending stream of emails while
continuing to send other emails

MONITORING AND ENFORCING
COMPLIANCE ON INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTS

GETTING ACCOUNT REPUTATION METRICS

SETUP MONITORING ON YOUR ACCOUNT
• Monitoring the overall sending health
• Recommended Thresholds:
• Bounce rate recommended limit of 0.05 (5%)
• Complaint rate recommended limit of 0.0001 (0.1%)

ACTIONS ON ACCOUNT ALARMS
• Amazon SES offers the ability to programmatically pause the sending for your
account when your metrics cross your configured threshold
• Based on the Amazon CloudWatch alarm, an SNS notification is published
for monitors going into alarm
• SNS triggers a Lambda function calling an SES API to pause your sending
• Can extend AWS Lambda to run other actions

SETTING UP ALARMING & AUTOMATIC ACTIONS

Demo
Putting all these together …

RESUMING SENDING AFTER MITIGATING ROOT CAUSE
• Adjust the Amazon CloudWatch alarm threshold or temporarily disable actions to
prevent automatic pause on sending resumed
• Use Amazon SES API to resume sending for your account
• Once metric returns to expected levels, re-enable alarm actions/re-adjust the
alarm threshold
• We recommend continued monitoring as resetting your metrics risks the account
being put on probation or suspended

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT IN A
MULTITENANT ENVIRONMENT

FINE-GRAINED REPUTATION TRACKING
• Monitor the sending of different departments separately
• Helps you discover and manage isolated problems before they damage your
businesses reputation with recipients and SES
• Same recommendations for alarm thresholds (bounce rate 0.05, complaint rate
0.0001)

GETTING CONFIGURATION SET
REPUTATION METRICS

THE ZENDESK JOURNEY
USING AWS SES

MELVIN RAM
STAFF ENGINEER, ZENDESK

AGENDA
What Is Zendesk?
Our Problems
Why Amazon Simple Email Service
Architecture Overview

A platform for serving customers
throughout their journey
Our most popular channel for support is email.

{…}

Email is critical for Zendesk.

We send and receive hundreds
of millions of emails each month.

Slowdowns in receiving or sending emails
are RED ALERT events at Zendesk.

Changes to our email
infrastructure are
made strategically,
thoughtfully, and
cautiously.

We started our journey
with Amazon SES to solve
real, significant problems.

Before we dive in, you need
to understand some basics
about our infrastructure.

ZENDESK SYSTEMS ARE DEPLOYED TO PODS
Database
App 1
App 2Sys 3
Sys 4
POD 1

Data center 1
POD 1 POD 2
Data center 2
POD 3 POD 4

NOW LET’S DIVE IN
REALITIES AND PROBLEMS WE WERE FACING

R E A L I T Y # 1
Maintaining email infrastructure is
expensive and riddled with dangers.

Monitoring blacklists
and keeping IPs in
reserve in case of a
blacklisting event

Keeping a copy of
outgoing emails

Adding boxes in
data centers is
expensive, and
turnaround
is slow.

Spikes in volume can
result in delays that
we considered
unacceptable.

R E A L I T Y # 2
Danger of (accidentally)
DDOS’ing ourselves

Here’s an email.
Don’t send an email
Email
Provider
Here’s an email.
Here’s an email.

R E A L I T Y # 3
Zendesk transitioning
to the cloud

During our initial efforts to build a pod on AWS,
we deferred figuring out how to send emails.

Earlier this year, we made the decision
to migrate completely to the cloud.

R E A L I T Y # 4
Persistent Spammers

Zendesk is an
attractive target
for spammers.

During our evaluation
phase, we were hit by
some creative
spammers.

To solve these problems, we started
evaluating email service providers.

OUR NEEDS WERE SIMPLE:
Reliability is paramount
Help us combat spammers
Protect our legitimate customers
Continue obeying data locality laws

BASED ON THIS CRITERIA,
WE SELECTED AMAZON SES

MULTIPLE REGION SUPPORT
Oregon N. Virginia
Ireland

RELIABILITY METRICS WERE TRANSPARENT
AND BEST AMONG THOSE CONSIDERED
Two service disruptions over the past year:
1 hour 4 hours
Limited to a single region.

FEEDBACK DATA COULD BE USED TO
REACT FASTER TO ABUSIVE ACCOUNTS

What does the architecture for this look like?

EMAIL ROUTING BASED ON HEADER

Dedicated
IP Pools That
Reflect Customer
Trust Level

DMARC Pass

Thank you!

ARC210_Building Scalable Multi-Tenant Email Sending Programs

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