This document discusses scaling applications on AWS. It provides an overview of AWS services including EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, and Lambda. It describes how applications can be hosted on EC2 instances, Elastic Beanstalk, or Lambda. It also discusses manual and automatic scaling techniques using EC2 auto scaling groups and CloudWatch metrics as well as how higher level services like Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda handle scaling transparently. Infrastructure as code using Terraform is presented as a way to provision AWS resources in a reusable and auditable manner.

1. Scaling on AWS
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

2. 1.
Agenda
1. Background
2. AWS Cloud & EC2 overview
3. Scaling on AWS
4. Infrastructure As Code

3. Personal Background
16 years of Java development
(Banks, Telcos, Government sector)
20+ years of Linux experience
1 year in
3

4. 4
A family held corporation
Retail, Hotels, Restaurants,
Real Estate
Generating 220,000 jobs
Target 2018: $11.9B
Thailand, Vietnam,
Malaysia, Germany, Italy,
Austria, Denmark, others

5. 5
Project AIP
System integration for the
new e-commerce platform
on AWS Cloud

6. War Stories
◂ Deploy 72 vCPU machines within
minutes when demand arose
◂ Scale out automatically as measured
load increases in production
◂ Upgrade a production cluster under
load with no downtime
◂ Deploy a full new environment in an
hour (network, DBs, ELK, instances,
monitoring, etc.)
6

7. AWS Cloud
◂ “The cloud is just someone else's computer”
◂ Started in 2006 with S3, EC2, SQS
◂ Offers 100+ services now
◂ Layered services (EC2-Beanstalk-Lambda)
◂ “Pay only for what you use”
◂ Free tier! - https://aws.amazon.com/free/
7

8. 8

9. AWS service categories
◂ IaaS
◂ Cloud provides: Hardware + OS
◂ You: patch, upgrade, deploy, monitor, maintain
◂ eg. AWS VPC, EBS, EC2
◂ PaaS
◂ Cloud provides: Hardware + OS + Framework
◂ You: deploy, monitor
◂ eg. AWS S3, Beanstalk
◂ SaaS
◂ Cloud provides: Hardware + OS + Framework + Application
◂ You: deploy
◂ eg. AWS RDS, Lambda
9

10. Hosting your application
◂ EC2 (IaaS)
◂ Get a VM, do what you want
◂ Beanstalk (PaaS)
◂ Provide a JAR file
◂ Lambda (SaaS)
◂ Upload a function which gets invoked
(eg. bridged to a REST API)
10

11. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud
◂ Base service for IaaS virtualization
◂ Single VM instances
◂ Auto scaling groups
◂ Elastic Load Balancer
11

12. EC2 Hello World
1. Choose an AMI
2. Choose an EC2 instance type
Choose VPC, Subnet, Security Groups, Elastic IP, EBS disks, Shutdown behaviour, ...
<<< these are all optional :)
3. Select SSH key for authentication
4. Launch
Deploy and login to a new machine in ~2 minutes with any configuration!
12

13. Place your screenshot here
13
Choosing an AMI
Prepared
virtual machine
templates

14. EC2 instance classes
General purpose
T2 (burstable) or M5 instances
Compute optimized
C5 instances
3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum processors
Run each core at up to 3.5 GHz using Intel
Turbo Boost Technology
14
Other instance types
Memory optimized
GPU optimized
Storage optimized

15. CloudWatch
15

16. Scaling up
16

17. Horizontal
- Balance load
between instances
- Achieve high availability
(survive hw failures **)
- Autoscale
based on measured load
Horizontal vs Vertical scaling
Vertical
- Get a bigger machine
17

18. Scaling *** as a Service
◂ IaaS
◂ eg. AWS EC2
◂ Scaling is manual
◂ PaaS
◂ eg. AWS Beanstalk
◂ Scaling is provided
◂ SaaS
◂ eg. AWS Lambda, SQS
◂ Scaling is invisible
“Standard queues support a nearly unlimited number of
transactions per second (TPS) per action.” 18

19. Scaling with EC2 - manual configuration
◂ EC2 Launch configuration
◂ AMI + startup script (optional)
◂ EC2 Autoscaling group
◂ Min / max instance count
◂ Elastic Load Balancer
◂ Target Groups
◂ CloudWatch metrics alarms
◂ eg. CPU %, network load, etc.
◂ Autoscaling policies
◂ Alarm -> Scale up 1 instance, cooldown
19

20. Scaling with Beanstalk
20

21. Place your screenshot here
21
Scaling with Lambda

22. Infrastructure
as Code
Provisioning data centers
through machine-readable
definition files
22

23. Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
◂ No more manual configuration on UI
◂ No human mistakes
◂ No single heros
everyone on team can execute it
◂ Fast, reusable
◂ Auditable (git history)
23

24. Place your screenshot here
24
Terraform Modules
define Resources what
you need to provision
use variables for input
reused for different
environments

25. Input configuration for
modules
Separate configuration for each
environment
Define requested state
Terraform
Environments
25

26. 26
Terraform Apply
Shows result configuration

27. 27
Thanks!
Any questions?
You can find me at:
◂ @kjozsa
◂ kristof.jozsa@dpc.hu
◂