This document discusses moving a web application to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and managing it with RightScale. It outlines the challenges of the previous single-server deployment, including lack of scalability and single point of failure. The solution presented uses AWS services like EC2, S3, EBS and RDS combined with RightScale for management and Zend Server for the application architecture. This provides auto-scaling, high availability, backups and easier management compared to the previous setup. Alternatives to AWS and RightScale are also briefly discussed.

1. Moving to Amazon Web
Services
And keeping it under control with
RightScale

3. Who am I?
• Mark Moline (@polloboy)
– Long time Internet developer:
research, software dev,
publishing, event photography
– Pre WWW
– PHP since v3

4. • Generate leads for online and traditional colleges and
universities
• Two primary public-facing sites:
– AchieveYourCareer.com
– FindYourDegree.com
• Numerous B2B portals
• Custom Matching Algorithms to
find best fit for students
• Targeted high-volume campaigns

5. What will we talk about?
• Typical web application deployment
architectures
• Challenges and problems
• AWS / RightScale / Zend components
• Our solution
• Other considerations
• Alternative Solutions

6. How do your applications grow?
• All-in-One
Apache
PHP
Session Files MySQL DB

7. How do your applications grow?
• Separate DB Server
Apache
PHP
Session Files
MySQL Server

8. How do your applications grow?
• Typical multi-server load balanced app
Load Balancer
MySQL Server

9. Challenges
• Main Issues
– Sessions
• Scale up and down
– DB Scaling
• Replication, backups, failover
• Other Areas
– HA Sessions
– HA DB
– Caching

10. The Old Way
• Organically grown, single monolithic server.
• Entire app on one box.
• In-house SVN for source code
• S3 for backups
Apache SVN
PHP
Session Files MySQL DB
S3

11. Problems
• No room for traffic bursts
• FRAGILE – Don’t want to upgrade X
because it may break Y
• Single point of failure – could bring
business down for hours or possibly days
• Encouraged manual hacking instead of
best practices. “It’s OK, I’ll just edit this file
on the live server…”

12. http://aws.amazon.com/products
• Servers: EC2
– Various sizes (and prices) from 613MB + 2EC2 Compute Units
to 68.4GB + 26EC2 Compute Units
– Compute unit approx 1.7GHz Xeon or 1.2GHz Opteron ca 2007
• Storage: S3 and EBS
– S3: static files, can link to Cloud Front for CDN, very high
availability and reliability
– EBS: disk storage for your EC2 instances
• Database: RDS
– Cloud version of MySQL – works but not very tuneable
– Great for quick tests and very standard applications
– Usually better to put your own MySQL installation on a dedicated EC2 instance
– Plenty of others including NoSQL, Dynamo DB, Key/Value store…
• Load Balancing, DNS, Queueing, Messaging, workflows,

13. • RightScale manages your AWS (or other
cloud) instances for you.
• Monitoring and relaunch on crash
• Scale up/down based on defined metrics
• Pre-built server templates ready for use or
customization

14. RightScale Server Templates and Deployments
• Start with AWS EC2
instance
• Run a series of shell
scripts to install and
build needed services
• Everything scripted from
standard inputs
• Easy to customize and
extend. Essential.
• Revision Control with
commit and rollback for
scripts and templates
and deployments.

15. Zend Server Cluster Manager
• Pre-configured Zend PHP architecture
• Based on industry best practices
• Auto-scaling based on system and
application load metrics, supported by
load balancing
• PHP session clustering for high
availability
• Redundant database with snapshots,
failover, and recovery
• Caching
• Code tracing / debugging
• In Zend Server 5.6 also get deployment

16. How our little big system grew

17. Benefits
• No more single point of (disastrous) failure
• MySQL master/slave replication and EBS
Snapshot backups “just work”
• Better reliability because everything is
scripted. No more manual build processes
• Easy to clone and test new configs
• Testing environment identical to production
• Flexibility to change architecture as needed
• Increased capacity, of course

18. Other Considerations
• Test your failover strategy – Chaos
Monkey
• Document your process – in-house wiki
• Move source out of house
• Leverage Amazon Cloud Front for CDN
• Keep S3 secure – keys and ACLs
• Buy reserved instances as soon as
possible
• Keep “warm” spare in a different cloud

19. Alternatives?
• Cloud:
– Rackspace, SoftLayer, Eucalyptus,
CloudStack, more every day
• Management:
– Eucalyptus
– Scalr.net
– Enstratus
• App Server
– Roll your own…

20. Roll Your Own?
• Host Your Web Site in the Cloud – Jeff Barr
• Programming Amazon Web Services – James Murty
• Programming Amazon EC2 – Jurg van Vliet, Flavia Paganelli

21. Q&A
• Questions?
• Mark Moline
@polloboy
mark.moline@gmail.com