What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? What Can I Do with AWS? Web Application Hosting Fault Tolerance & High Availability

1. Barcamp Macau 2014
Introduction to AWS
Edison Wong
2014 Oct 4th

2. Edison Wong
● CEO, PantaRei Design
– hswong3i@pantarei-design.com
● Drupal developer & contributor
– https://drupal.org/user/33940
● HKDUG Co-founder
– https://groups.drupal.org/drupalhk
● Startup founder
– 2009 - PantaRei Design founded
– 2010 - YBHK applicant
– 2011 - ITF SERAP applicant
– 2011 - HKSTP Incu-Tech applicant

3. PantaRei Design
● Hong Kong based Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) service provider
– Content Management System (CMS) with Drupal
– Cloud hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
– Team collaborate solution with Atlassian
● Business Partnership
– 2012 - AWS Consulting Partner
– 2013 - Acquia Partner
– 2013 - Atlassian Experts
– 2014 - Rackspace Hosting Partner
● FOSS Contributor
– 2008 - Hong Kong Drupal User Group Co-founder
– 2012 - Drupal Services Provider

7. Outline
● What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)?
● What Can I Do with AWS?
● Web Application Hosting
● Fault Tolerance & High Availability

8. What is AWS?
● Amazon Web Services (AWS)
– Cloud computing
– Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
– Provides computing resource and services
– Pay-as-you-go pricing

9. What is AWS? (cont.)
● History
– 1994: Founded by Jeff Bezos
● Initial product with online virtual bookstore
– 2000: Survived the dot-com bubble burst
● Lots of infrastructure (some said ~90%) idled
● Need some way to utilize such resource
– 2003: Why not resell the resource DIRECTLY?
– 2006: AWS officially launched

11. What is AWS? (cont.)
● AWS Management Console
– Web-based user interface
– Access all AWS service in one place
● https://console.aws.amazon.com/

12. What Can I Do with AWS?
● Foundation Services
– Deploy IT infrastructure in the cloud
– Compute, storage, database, etc
● Application Services
– Add functionality to application
– Search, messaging, CDN, etc
● Administration Services
– Manage AWS resources
– Identity, monitoring, deployment, etc

14. What Can I Do with AWS? (cont.)
● Route 53
● CloudFront
● Simple Storage Service (S3)
● Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
● Elastic Block Store (EBS)
● Auto Scaling
● Relational Database Service (RDS)
● … and more!!

15. Route 53
● Domain Name System (DNS)
● ONLY provide domain name management
– You need to register domain name somewhere else
● USD0.50 per hosted zone / month

16. CloudFront
● Content Delivery Network (CDN)
● Serve content to end-users with high availability and high
performance
● Distribute static or dynamic content, e.g.
– .html
– .css
– .js
– .php
– Image
– Video, etc

17. Simple Storage Service (S3)
● Stores and retrieves digital files
● Object storage
● Can serve static content website DIRECTLY!!
● NOT FTP!!

18. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
● Virtual computing
– Seems like VMWare, VirtualBox or Virtual PC
● Resizable computing capacity, e.g.
– m3.medium: 1 vCPU, 3.75GB RAM
– m3.2xlarge: 8 vCPU, 30GB RAM (!?)
● Can run with Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, RedHat) or
Windows instance

19. Elastic Block Store (EBS)
● Block storage
● Persistent file system for EC2
● Seems like physical harddisk in PC
● Up to 1TB per disk
– Always use LVM under Linux for live
add/remove/update partition management!!

20. Auto Scaling
● Add or remove EC2 dynamically
● Scale-up or scale-down due to peaks and lulls
in traffic

21. Relational Database Service (RDS)
● Database-as-a-Service
● Support MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server
● Support multiple Available Zone (AZ) High
Availability (HA) setup by default
– P.S. Multiple instance required (i.e. more $$)

22. Web Application Hosting
● LAMP
– a.k.a. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP
– Most common system architecture for Drupal
● Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
– Apache 2.4
– MySQL 5.5
– PHP 5.5
– Drupal 7.x compatible

23. Web Application Hosting (cont.)
● Virtualmin
– http://www.virtualmin.com/
– FOSS Web-based system management GUI
● Manage (almost) everything for virtual hosting
– DNS (Bind9)
– Mail (Postfix) + spam filter (Spamassassin) + virus filter (ClamAV)
– Web (Apache) + PHP
– Database (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
● Our one-line script for installation (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS):
– https://github.com/phpshift/virtualmin-installer

25. Web Application Hosting (cont.)
● AWS (Amazon Web Service)
– CDN (Content Delivery Network)
– AZ (Available Zone)
– RDS (Relational Database Service)
● Can scale-out and scale-up in a flexible style
– EC2
– Elastic Load Balancing
– Auto Scaling

27. Fault Tolerance & High Availability
● Hot Spare ($$$$$)
– Real-time sync and replacement on failure
– Usually combine with performance scale-out
● Warm Spare ($$)
– Maybe async and replace during failure
– May not as powerful as master setup
● Cold Spare ($)
– Usually periodically backup to similar setup
– May even just backup useful data for restore
– Need more time for resume during failure

28. Fault Tolerance & High Availability
(cont.)
● About 99.99%
– 1m (weekly), 4m19s (monthly) or 52m33s (yearly)
● Solution
– Implement multiple layer, e.g. web, application,
database, storage, etc
– Each layer coming with failover and recovery
solution
– e.g. MySQL in master-slave replication (or AWS
RDS)

30. Q&A

31. References
● http://www.slideshare.net/davinken/amazon-web-servic
es-history-overview-presentation
● http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
● http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgs
g-intro/gsg-aws-intro.html
● http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudhsm/latest/gsg/ha-be
st-practices.html
● http://www2.safenet-inc.com/AWS-guides/Luna_High_
Availability_and_Load_Balancing_TN2013_revA.pdf
● http://www.slideshare.net/BarcampSaigonOrganizer/high-availability-
how-to-get-9999-service-availabilty-desig
ning-clusters-dos-donts

32. Thank You
● Please feel free to contact us:
– Unit 207, 2/F IC Development Centre, No.6 Science
Park West Avenue, Hong Kong Science Park,
Shatin, N.T.
– +852 3576 3812
– http://pantarei-design.com/
– sales@pantarei-design.com