1. AWS experience

2. About Me
• Thierry Schellenbach
• Founder Fashiolista
• Github/tschellenbach
• Github/Feedly & Django Facebook
• Blog: mellowmorning.com
• @tschellenbach

3. Launched Fashiolista at TNW
Got a few hundred users
And went back to work

4. Brazil?!
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Capricho
• 2nd largest
fashion
community

5. Global Fashion Discovery

8. Challenges/ Why AWS
1. Rapid growth,
colocation == pain
2. Focus on product
3. Easily test new
infrastructure
4. Handle peak load
5. Replace first, debug
later

9. Growing pains
1. Stability issues
2. High costs (pre 12K, post 23K, now 9K),
3. Scaling challenges

10. Fixes for stability
1. Everything is code
1. Cloud formation
2. Puppet
3. Fabric, BOTO, Snaptastic
2. Auto scaling groups for everything
3. Deploy in minutes (tricky while auto scaling)

11. Keeping costs down
• Tag those instances!
• Manage EBS volumes
properly
(Snaptastic)
• Spot instances (lower
auto scaling thresholds)
• S3 expiration policies

12. Scalability
1. Cassandra in the cloud
(see high scalability post,
bit.ly/1krex39)
2. Scalable newsfeeds
Github.com/tschellenbach/Feedl
y
3. Cassandra backup to S3
Github.com/tbarbugli/cassandra
_snapshotter

13. Android Example
Featured by Google
• Requests/s times 5
• Auto scaling kicked in
– Web 4 -> 12
– Task workers 5 -> 15
– Image resizing 2 -> 15
• No downtime, no missed
sleep, happy users

14. Conclude
• Close to zero downtime
• Costs are low at 9K monthly (2 million users)
• Flexibility to rearrange architecture
• No upfront costs
• Sysadmin is largely automated
• Focus on product

15. Get in touch!
thierryschellenbach@gmail.com
@tschellenbach
Github.com/tschellenbach/Snaptastic
Github.com/tschellenbach/Feedly
Github.com/tbarbugli/cassandra_snapshotter