This presentation looks at how start-ups can use AWS to power a lean lifecycle when running, scaling, and iterating. By Ryan Shuttleworth, AWS Technical Evangelist

1. Leveraging AWS for
the lean
development cycle

2. What is the “lean
development cycle”?

3. Sprint Pivot
Just in time
Working software
MVP
Fast Fail fast; learn rapidly Stand up meeting
Flexible Continuous integration
Iterate
Code not documentation
Agility Think big; act small Last ethical point

4. Idea Product

5. Least friction
Idea Product
Highest quality

6. Idea Product

7. Shortest time
Idea Product
Highest accuracy

8. Idea Product

9. Failing fast
when you need
to
Idea Product

10. Product
Idea Product
Product

11. Freedom to Product
pivot if you
have to
Idea Product
Product

12. How?

13. How?
use a platform built for iteration

14. A startup
journey…

15. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

16. 1
Idea
You've got a great idea and need to
validate it with some marketing

17. Get
fast feedback

18. Get
a website

19. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-templates/

20. Get started with business apps in a click

21. Add a $30 template

22. Sit back
test & measure

23. Validate Define
Marketing message What to build
Potential product features Priorities
Social interest Wish lists
1x free tier instance
Zero cost

24. Validate Define
Marketing message What to build
Potential product features Priorities
Social interest Wish lists
AWS: 1x free tier instance
Zero cost

25. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

26. 2
Deployment
You got some interest, defined your MVP
and built it…

27. Launch on a
positive SLA

28. Launch on a
positive SLA
Start as you AWS lets you build
mean to go on ‘web-scale’ systems

29. Features may be lacking
but it needs to be up

30. and it should stay up

33. Deploy Operate
Deliver simple things Simplify operations
Deliver them well Spend more time on your
application
Managed ‘model’ architecture
Scalability & availability from the start

34. Deploy Operate
Deliver simple things Simplify operations
Deliver them well Spend more time on your
application
AWS: Managed ‘model’ architecture
Scalability & availability from the start

35. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

36. 3
Customers
People are using your product, lots of them
from all over the world

37. Scale out

38. as-create-auto-scaling-group MyGroup
--launch-configuration MyConfig
--availability-zones eu-west-1a
--min-size 4
--max-size 200
Trigger auto-
scaling policy
Auto-scaling
Automatic re-sizing of compute clusters based upon demand

39. Tune the Elastic Beanstalk
Instance counts
Cooldown
Trigger metrics

40. Scale up

41. Buy time with instance sizes
Vertical Scaling
From $0.02/hr
Scale up with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Basic unit of compute capacity
Range of CPU, memory & local disk options
Many instance types available, from micro through cluster
compute to SSD backed

42. Offload

43. CloudFront
World-wide content
distribution network
Served from S3
3 Easily distribute content
/images/*
to end users with low
latency, high data
transfer speeds, and no
commitments.
London 2 Served from EC2
*.php
Paris
1 Single CNAME
www.mysite.com
NY

44. Without CloudFront
EC2 webservers/app servers loaded by user
requests

45. With CloudFront
Load of user requests pushed into
CloudFront, EC2 cluster can scale
down
Offload
Scale
Down

46. No CDN CDN for CDN for
Static Static &
Content Dynamic
Content
Offload
Scale
Down
Response Time
Response Time
Response Time
Server Load
Server
Server
Load
Load

47. Add a CDN and go global

48. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

49. 4
It breaks
3am in the morning, things go wrong

50. Technical debt
catches up with you

51. Technical debt
needs paying down

52. Review Optimize Refactor
Database backups Database performance NoSQL for data hot-spots
EBS snapshots Instance sizes Caching strategies
Volume sizes Provisioned IOPS Decoupling

53. Review Optimize Refactor
Database backups Database performance NoSQL for data hot-spots
EBS snapshots Instance sizes Caching strategies
Volume sizes Provisioned IOPS Decoupling
Ensure things Buy some time Pay down
aren’t ‘hitting the with sensible technical debt
sides’ tweaks you’ve accrued

54. Review Optimize Refactor
Database backups Database performance NoSQL for data hot-spots
EBS snapshots Instance sizes Caching strategies
Volume sizes Provisioned IOPS Decoupling
Ensure things Buy some time Pay down
aren’t ‘hitting the with sensible technical debt
sides’ tweaks you’ve accrued

57. Relational Database Service
Use RDS for databases Database-as-a-Service
No need to install or manage database instances
Scalable and fault tolerant configurations
DynamoDB Use DynamoDB for
Provisioned throughput NoSQL database high performance key-
Fast, predictable performance
value DB
Fully distributed, fault tolerant architecture

58. Amazon SQS Reliable message
Processing results Reliable, highly scalable, queue service
queuing without
for storing messages as they travel
Amazon SQS between instances
additional software
1
Processing
task/processing
trigger 2
Push inter-process Simple Workflow Task A
workflows into the Reliably coordinate processing steps
Task B 3
across applications
cloud with SWF (Auto-scaling)
Integrate AWS and non-AWS resources
Manage distributed state in complex
systems Task C

59. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

60. 5
Automation
No-one wants to get up at 3am ever again

61. Everything is programmable
Access everything Achieve the highest levels
via CLI, API or Compute of automation
Console Security Scaling sophistication with ease
CDN Backup
DNS Database
Storage Load Balancing
Workflow Monitoring
Networking
Messaging

62. Everything is programmable

63. Everything is programmable
Start thinking
like this guy… …is doing this to
your system

64. Infrastructure as code
automate it so you
don’t have to

65. Idea Evolution
1 6
Deployment It breaks
2 4 5
Automation
3
Customers

66. 6
Evolution
Operations are efficient so you have time
to iterate and innovate

67. Stay lean
keep testing what you
are doing

69. Instrument everything, all of
the time

70. Inspect the whole distribution

71. e.g. service latency
Address the tail
‘the worst case’

72. e.g. service latency
Improve the
overall
picture

73. Put everything in logs
so you can do something with it

74. Put everything in logs
so you can do something with it
1 instance for 100 hours
=
100 instances for 1 hour

75. Get smart
and keep teams small

76. Lean meets agile

77. Lean meets agile
while(true) {
if(change checked into SVN){
build & test
sleep 60
}
}

78. Lean meets agile
Automated testing
Continuous Integration
Infrastructure as code
Continuous Delivery
Elastic Resources Pay as you go

79. Deployments at Amazon.com:
11.6s 1,079 10,000 30,000
Mean time Max number of Mean number of Max number of
between deployments in a hosts hosts
deployments single hour simultaneously simultaneously
(weekday) receiving a receiving a
deployment deployment

80. Idea Product

81. Least friction
Idea Product
Highest quality

82. Idea Product

83. Idea Product
AWS

84. Don’t take it from me…

85. …hear how a team of
pros do it