@ Cloud Connect: Design Patterns in the Cloud: A Love Story : elemental cloud computing

Speaker – Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Jinesh is doing a nice job describing the evolution of a fictional (dating) website that is live only 3 hours a week. In telling the story, he is walking through the site’s evolution, the developer’s knowledge of patterns (really good design practices) and the related AWS cloud offerings (patterns of use).

Pattern #1: Design for failure and nothing will fail

Pattern #2: Always edge cache your static data (Amazon CloudFront)

Pattern #3: Implement elasticity

Next challenge for the developer is dealing with scale. Principles of elastic cloud architectures:

Resilient to reboot & re-launch: automatically re-launch and restart
stateless: extract stateful components and make them stateless
Packable into an AMI
Decouple: Isolate the components using Amazon SQS (queues). Decouple code with deployment and configuration.

Jinesh calls out the Netflix Chaos Monkey pattern.

Elasticity also means scale-out. So, the developer adds Elastic Load Balancer and create an Auto Scaling Group.

Pattern #4: Leverage Multiple Availability Zones (Feature on RDS, creates a standby slave)

Pattern #5: Isolate read and write traffic; Isolate static and dynamic traffic (Use RDS read replica)

Pattern #6: Automate your in-cloud Software Development & Deployment Lifecycle (Automate using cloud APIs – scripts)

Scripts provide: repeatability, savings (suspend/resume), productivity, and freedom to experiment.

Interesting point, used to “move” from staging to production. With cloud, you can make Stage into Production, and then drop the current Production instances. Saves time, reduces errors.

Pattern #7: Cache as much as possible (Memcache in new cache tier)

Pattern #8: Hardening security at every stage (infrastructure security, application security and services security)

Pattern #9: Go Global Quickly with a Single API

Pattern #10 Keep optimizing and see the savings in the next month’s bill (example, use reserve instances)

Started with single node architecture, now global, scaleable, fault tolerant application, while minimizing run-time cost.

Good session.