The document outlines strategies for building a scalable technology platform for startups, emphasizing the importance of avoiding over-engineering and utilizing a stateless architecture. Key components include using Amazon services like RDS, DynamoDB, and Elastic Load Balancing to support growth without performance degradation. It also highlights the necessity of simplifying operations with deployment tools and maintaining control over infrastructure while ensuring high availability and efficient resource management.

1. Scaling the Platform for your
Startup
Dean Bryen, AWS Solutions Architect
@deanbryen

2. Why are you here?
• Building the technology platform for your startup
• You want to prepare for success
• Learn about design patterns & scalability
• A pragmatic approach for startups

3. Priorities for startups
• Racing within a window of opportunity
• Small team with no legacy
• Focus on solving a problem
• Avoid over-engineering & re-engineering
• Reduce risk of failure when you go viral

4. A scalable architecture
• Can support growth in users, traffic, data size
• Without practical limits
• Without a drop in performance
• Seamlessly - just by adding more resources
• Efficiently - in terms of cost per user

5. Amazon Route 53
DNS service
The end goal
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 2
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Elastic Load
Balancing
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 3
RDS read
replica
RDS read
replica
DynamoDB
RDS read
replica
ElastiCache
node 4
RDS read
replica
ElastiCache
node 1
CloudSearch
Lambda
SES
SQS

6. Day 1
THE server
(e.g. Apache,
MySQL)
Elastic IP
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Server Image (AMI)

7. Day 2 – Public Beta
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Web
server
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service

8. Day 3 – Improving Efficiency
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Web
server
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Amazon CloudFront
ElastiCache
Node

9. Day 4 – High Availability
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Web
server
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Amazon CloudFront
ElastiCache
node 1

10. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Availability Zone b
Web
server
Web
server
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Amazon CloudFront
ElastiCache
node 1
Day 4 – High Availability

11. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Availability Zone b
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
S3 bucket for
static assets
Amazon CloudFront
ElastiCache
node 1
Day 4 – High Availability

12. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Availability Zone b
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
S3 bucket for
static assets
ElastiCache
node 1
Amazon CloudFront
Day 4 – High Availability

13. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
Availability Zone b
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
RDS DB
standby
S3 bucket for
static assets
ElastiCache
node 1
Amazon CloudFront
Day 4 – High Availability

14. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 1
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
RDS DB
standby
Day 4 – High Availability

15. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 1
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 2
Day 4 – High Availability

16. User sessions
• Problem: Often stored on local disk
(not shared)
• Quickfix: ELB Session stickiness
• Solution: DynamoDB
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
Logged in Logged out

17. Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 1
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 2
Day 4 – High Availability
DynamoDB

18. Day 5
Scaling the web tier
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 1
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Elastic Load
Balancing
Web
server
Web
server
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 2
Web
server
Web
server
DynamoDB

19. Decompose into small,
loosely coupled, stateless
building blocks
Prerequisite

20. What does this mean in practice?
• Only store transient data on local disk
• Needs to persist beyond a single http request?
– Then store it elsewhere
User uploads
User Sessions
Amazon S3
AWS DynamoDB
Application Data
Amazon RDS

21. Having decomposed into
small, loosely coupled,
stateless building blocks
You can now Scale out with ease
Having
done
that…

22. Having decomposed into
small, loosely coupled,
stateless building blocks
We can also Scale back with ease
Having
done
that…

23. Amazon Route 53
DNS service
Day 5
Scaling the data layer
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 2
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Elastic Load
Balancing
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 3
RDS read
replica
DynamoDB
ElastiCache
node 4
RDS read
replica
ElastiCache
node 1

24. Take the shortcut
• While this architecture is simple you still need
to deal with:
– Configuration details
– Deploying code to multiple instances
– Maintaining multiple environments (Dev, Test, Prod)
– Maintain different versions of the application
• Solution: Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk

25. AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB)
• Easily deploy, monitor, and scale three-tier web
applications and services.
• Infrastructure provisioned and managed by EB
• You maintain control.
• Preconfigured application containers
• Easily customizable.
• Support for these platforms:

26. Day 6 – Add more features

27. Mobile
Push
Notifications
Mobile
Analytics
Cognito
Cognito
Sync
Analytics
Kinesis
Data
Pipeline
RedShift EMR
Your Applications
AWS Global Infrastructure
Network
VPC
Direct
Connect
Route 53
Storage
EBS S3 Glacier CloudFront
Database
DynamoDBRDS ElastiCache
Deployment & Management
Elastic
Beanstalk
OpsWorks
Cloud
Formation
Code
Deploy
Code
Pipeline
Code
Commit
Security & Administration
CloudWatch Config
Cloud
Trail
IAM Directory KMS
Application
SQS SWF
App
Stream
Elastic
Transcoder
SES
Cloud
Search
SNS
Enterprise Applications
WorkSpaces WorkMail WorkDocs
Compute
EC2 ELB
Auto
Scaling
LambdaECS

28. AWS building blocks
Inherently Scalable & Highly Available Scalable & Highly Available
! Elastic Load Balancing
! Amazon CloudFront
! Amazon Route53
! Amazon S3
! Amazon SQS
! Amazon SES
! Amazon CloudSearch
! AWS Lambda
! …
! Amazon DynamoDB
! Amazon Redshift
! Amazon RDS
! Amazon Elasticache
! …
" Amazon EC2
" Amazon VPC
Automated Configurable With the right architecture

29. Amazon Route 53
DNS service
No limit
Availability Zone a
RDS DB
instance
ElastiCache
node 2
Availability Zone b
S3 bucket for
static assets
www.example.com
Elastic Load
Balancing
RDS DB
standby
ElastiCache
node 3
RDS read
replica
RDS read
replica
DynamoDB
RDS read
replica
ElastiCache
node 4
RDS read
replica
ElastiCache
node 1
CloudSearch
Lambda
SES
SQS

30. Some other Architectures

31. Amazon EMR: Batch processing
GBs of logs pushed
to Amazon S3 hourly
Daily Amazon EMR
cluster using Hive to
process data
Input and output
stored in Amazon S3
250 Amazon EMR jobs per day, processing 30 TB of data
http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/yelp/

32. Amazon EMR: Interactive query
TBs of logs sent daily
Logs stored in
Amazon S3
Amazon EMR cluster using Presto for ad hoc
analysis of entire log set
Interactive query using Presto on multipetabyte warehouse
http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/using-presto-in-our-big-
data-platform.html

33. Real Time Clickstream
Raw data
pushed to S3
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
Kinesis
Amazon
Kinesis
AWS Lambda

34. Summary

35. A quick review
• Keep it simple and stateless
• Make use of managed self-scaling services
• Multi-AZ and AutoScale your EC2 infrastructure
• Use the right DB for each workload
• Cache data at multiple levels
• Simplify operations with deployment tools

36. Next steps?
READ!
• aws.amazon.com/documentation
• aws.amazon.com/architecture
• aws.amazon.com/start-ups
ASK FOR HELP!
• forums.aws.amazon.com
• aws.amazon.com/support

37. @deanbryen