The document outlines best practices for designing and implementing IT architecture on AWS, emphasizing resilience against failures and the use of stateless solutions. It provides various strategies for ensuring high availability, including the configuration of backups and data replication across regions, distributed via CloudFormation templates. Additionally, it discusses automated deployment systems and the use of micro-services architecture to enhance flexibility and resource management.

1. Good practices to design and
implement IT architecture based
on AWS

2. About us
• 11+ years of professional experience in Unix
and 7+ years in Cloud Computing administration
• Founder at LCloud – “Linxsys Cloud”, AWS Partner
from 2012, first AWS Partner in Poland
• We are after 150+ AWS projects
• Enterprise experience:
• Email: jacek.biernat@linxsys.pl

3. Design for Failure – High Available
solution
One of the major reasons for migration to Cloud
Computing:
- Avoid single points of failure
- Assume everything fails
Our goal: Application should continue to
function even if the underlying physical
hardware fails or is removed or replicated

4. A simple Architecture

5. High Available Environment

6. Stateless solutions
Do not modify the application code:

7. Stateless solutions
Do not modify the application code:
- Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution with
Raid 1 via network: DRBD, GlusterFS

8. Stateless solutions
Do not modify the application code:
- Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution with
Raid 1 via network: DRBD, GlusterFS
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

9. Stateless solutions
Do not modify the application code:
- Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution with
Raid 1 via network: DRBD, GlusterFS
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
- Mount Amazon S3 bucket as file system: s3fs,
s3ql

10. Stateless solutions
Do not modify the application code:
- Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solution with
Raid 1 via network: DRBD, GlusterFS
- Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
- Mount Amazon S3 bucket as file system: s3fs,
s3ql
- Amazon Elastic Load Balancer with sticky
session (sometimes is enough)

11. Stateless solutions
Modify the application code:

12. Stateless solutions
Modify the application code:
- Our database tier

13. Stateless solutions
Modify the application code:
- Our database tier
- Amazon S3

14. Stateless solutions
Modify the application code:
- Our database tier
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Elasticache (Redis), Amazon
DynamoDB

15. When an AWS AZ in EU-West itself fails
?

16. When the Entire EU West region is
affected ?

17. Proposal of solutions when a region is
not available

18. Proposal of solutions when a region is
not available
• RTO and RPO is max. 24 hours
– Amazon Cloudformation templates
– Copy backup to second region

19. Proposal of solutions when a region is
not available
• RTO and RPO is max. 24 hours
– Amazon Cloudformation templates
– Copy backup to second region
• RTO and RPO is max. 5 minutes
– Amazon Cloudformation templates
– Configure Replication data between regions

20. Proposal of solutions when a region is
not available
• RTO and RPO is max. 24 hours
– Amazon Cloudformation templates
– Copy backup to second region
• RTO and RPO is max. 5 minutes
– Amazon Cloudformation templates
– Configure Replication data between regions
• Keep two active environments Master-Master
– Use a queue solution (Amazon DynamoDB, SQS)

21. Implement Elasticity
Don’t assume health or fixed location of
components. Use designs that are resilient to
reboot and re-launch.

22. Standardized Application Stacks

23. Approaches to designing AMI
1. Inventory of fully baked AMI
2. Base AMI with fetch
on boot
3. AMI with Agent to
management system

24. Fully baked AMI

25. Tools for fully baked AMI
• AWS Console
• AWS API with scripts

26. Base AMI

27. Base AMI
• Jenkins/Team City
• Amazon Cloudformation

28. Base AMI
• Jenkins/Team City
• Amazon Cloudformation
• Ansible playbooks
• Aminator

29. AMI with Agent to management
system

30. Tool to management system
• Puppet
• Chef
• Ansible

31. Micro-services and elastic resource
pools with AWS
• Each service is decoupled from the rest and
deployed individually
• We run multiple services on the same
instances
• An automated deployment system takes care
of all services lifecycle details

32. Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS)
– a fully managed platform

33. Thank you for your attention