by KD Singh, Partner Solution Architect, AWS

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
KD Singh, AWS Partner Solution Architect
AWS X-Ray
Debugging Applications at Scale
March 2017

2. What to expect from the session
 Overview
 Use Cases
 Concepts
 How AWS X-Ray works
 Getting Started
 Demo
 Pricing
 Docs and Resources
 Q&A

3. What is AWS X-Ray?

4. Debugging Applications

5. Debugging Applications
 A development environment
 Search through logs for clues to reproduce the issue
 Set breakpoints in code to stop execution, and inspect variables and call stack
 Add additional log statements as necessary and redeploy application
 Repeat until the issue is fixed
Traditional debugging involves:
Traditional process of debugging doesn’t scale well to production
applications or those built using a service-oriented, microservice, or
serverless architecture
It’s tedious, repetitive, and time consuming

6.  Simple to develop
 Simple to test and debug
 Simple to deploy
 Simple to scale
 Hard to iterate fast
 Hard to scale efficiently
 CI/CD time consuming and difficult
 Reliability challenges — a problem
with a single component can take
down the whole app
Monolithic vs. service-oriented applications
Applications traditionally developed using a
monolithic architecture
Benefits: Drawbacks:
Move to service oriented (microservices) architecture to overcome the
drawbacks of a monolithic application architecture
But microservices come with their own set of challenges

7. Challenges
Services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 Container Service, AWS Elastic
Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, etc. make it easier to deploy and manage
applications consisting of hundreds of services
Deploying and managing service-oriented applications can
be more work compared to monolithic applications
Still hard to debug application issues in production applications due to:
 Cross-service interactions
 Varying log formats across services
 Collecting, aggregating, and collating logs from services

8.  Identify performance bottlenecks and errors
 Pinpoint issues to specific service(s) in your application
 Identify impact of issues on users of the application
 Visualize the service call graph of your application
Solution
AWS X-Ray makes it easy to:

9. Use Cases

10. Visualize service call graph

11. Identify impact

12. Identify performance bottlenecks

13. Identify performance bottlenecks

14. Identify performance bottlenecks

15. Identify performance bottlenecks

16. Pinpoint issues

17. Pinpoint issues

18. Pinpoint issues

19. How does AWS X-Ray work?

20. X-Ray Concepts
Trace End-to-end data related a single request across services
Segments Portions of the trace that correspond to a single service
Sub-segments Remote call or local compute sections within a service
Annotations Business data that can be used to filter traces
Metadata Business data that can be added to the trace but not used for filtering traces
Errors Normalized error message and stack trace
Sampling Percentage of requests to your application to capture as traces

21. X-Ray Service

22. X-Ray SDK
Enables you to get started quickly without having to manually instrument your
application code to log metadata about requests
Available for Java, .NET, and Node.js
Adds filters to automatically captures metadata for calls to:
 AWS services using the AWS SDK
 Non-AWS services over HTTP and HTTPS
 Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon DynamoDB)
 Queues (Amazon SQS)

23. X-Ray Daemon
Receives data from the SDK over UDP and acts as a local buffer. Data
is flushed to the backend every second or when the local buffer fills.
Available for Amazon Linux AMI, RHEL, Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows.
Can be run anywhere as long as AWS credentials are provided (e.g.: EC2,
ECS, on premise, developer machine, etc.)

24. X-Ray API
 X-Ray provides a set of APIs to enable you to send, filter, and
retrieve trace data
 You can send trace data directly to the service without having to
use our SDKs (i.e.: you can write your own SDKs for languages
not currently supported)
 Raw trace data is available using batch get APIs
 You can build your own data analysis applications on top of the
data collected by X-Ray

25. Segment Document
Minimal example
{
"name" : "example.com",
"id" : "70de5b6f19ff9a0a",
"start_time" : 1.478293361271E9,
"trace_id" : "1-581cf771-a006649127e371903a2de979",
"end_time" : 1.478293361449E9
}
Example showing an in-progress segment
{
"name" : "example.com",
"id" : "70de5b6f19ff9a0b",
"start_time" : 1.478293361271E9,
"trace_id" : "1-581cf771-a006649127e371903a2de979",
“in_progress”: true
}

26. Sampling Configuration
{
"rules": {
"move": {
"id": 1,
"service_name": "*",
"http_method": "*",
"url_path": "/api/move/*",
"fixed_target": 0,
"rate": 0.05
},
"base": {
"id": 2,
"service_name": "*",
"http_method": "*",
"url_path": "*",
"fixed_target": 1,
"rate": 0.1
}
}
}
This example defines two rules.
The first rule applies a five-percent sampling rate
with no minimum number of requests to trace to
requests with paths under /api/move
The second overrides the default sampling rule
with a rule that traces the first request each
second and 10 percent of additional requests.

27. Getting Started

28. Agent installation (Amazon EC2 Linux)
#!/bin/bash
curl https://s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/aws-xray-assets.us-east-1/xray-daemon/aws-xray-
daemon-1.x.rpm -o /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm
yum install -y /home/ec2-user/xray.rpm

29. Agent Installation (Amazon EC2 Windows)

30. Agent installation (Amazon ECS)

31. Application instrumentation (Node.js)
//Add aws-xray-sdk package to package.json
var XRay = require('aws-xray-sdk');
var AWS = captureAWS(require('aws-sdk'));
…
XRay.config([XRay.plugins.EC2]);
XRay.captureHTTPs(http);
XRay.setDefaultName('myfrontend-dev');
…
app.use(XRay.express.openSegment());
app.get('/', function(req, res)…
app.get('/blog', function(req, res)…
app.use(XRay.express.closeSegment());

32. Pricing

33. X-Ray pricing
Free during the preview. After that:
Free tier
 The first 100,000 traces recorded per month are free
 The first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned per month are free
Additional charges
 Beyond the free tier, traces recorded cost $5.00 per million per month
 Beyond the free tier, traces retrieved or scanned cost $0.50 per million per month

34. Demo

35. Available in preview
 Go to https://aws.amazon.com/xray to sign up for the preview.
 Documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/aws-xray.html
 .NET Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-xray-dotnet-webapp
 Java Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-java-scorekeep/tree/xray
 Node.js Sample: https://github.com/awslabs/eb-node-express-sample/tree/xray
The AWS X-Ray service is available in preview today.

36. Questions?

37. Thank you!