Leveraging AWS for Lean Development Lifecycle

1. Leveraging AWS for Lean
Development Lifecycle
Ryan Shuttleworth – Technical Evangelist
@ryanAWS

2. What is the “lean
development cycle”?

3. Working software
Fast Sprint MVP
Pivot
Flexible Continuous integration
Iterate
Agility Code not documentation

4. Idea Product

5. Least friction
Idea Product
Highest quality

6. Idea Product

7. A Startup Journey
(your experiences may vary, but the
following is based on real experiences…)

8. “Democracy is the art of
running the circus from
the monkey cage.”
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

9. Outside it’s nice and neat:
Have a picnic on the lawn at the zoo
Inside it’s chaos: “Democracy is the art of
Screaming, swinging, banana-skins
running the circus from
the monkey cage.”
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

10. Outside it’s nice and neat:
Have a picnic on the lawn at the zoo
Inside it’s chaos: “Democracy is the art of
Screaming, swinging, banana-skins
running the circus from
the monkey cage.”
Sound like a startup?
Let everyone feel safe and H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
comfortable looking at you from
the outside

11. Outside it’s nice and neat:
Have a picnic on the lawn at the zoo
Inside it’s chaos: “Democracy is the art of
Screaming, swinging, banana-skins
running the circus from
the monkey cage.”
Sound like a startup?
Let everyone feel safe and H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
comfortable looking at you from
the outside
Manage the chaos on the inside

12. “Democracy is the art of
running the circus from
the startup monkey cage.”
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

13. “Democracy is the art of
running the circus from
the startup monkey cage.”
(and why the AWS cloud is the perfect place for one)

14. 1 The idea…
You've got a cracking idea, but don't know if there is point or a market

15. 1 The idea…
You've got a cracking idea, but don't know if there is point or a market
What CloudFormation a Wordpress site
Go buy a $30 template
Make it look real
AWS 1x free tier instance
Zero cost
Take-away Wait and see what traffic/interest you get

16. 1 The idea…
You've got a cracking idea, but don't know if there is point or a market
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-templates/

17. 2 Proving it…
Analytics prove you have a point, web hits increase traffic. A lot.

18. 2 Proving it…
Analytics prove you have a point, web hits increase traffic. A lot.
What They came, but then they go because it's too slow to respond
They came, signed up for a beta, proving you might actually
need to build something…
CDN your marketing presence
AWS
Easy, 60 minute update
You look global
You now have interest
Take-away
Keep it ticking over
Define the Minimum Viable Product (you can get away with)

19. 3 Customers…
You’ve got some people to give something to, so give them something

20. 3 Customers…
You’ve got some people to give something to, so give them something
What First phase application – make sure you launch it on
a positive SLA
Features may be lacking, but it needs to be up!
AWS Beanstalk – sow the seed, don’t worry about
complex operations yet
Multi-AZ – small instances, but highly available
Take-away
Deliver something simple, deliver it well
Keep those early adopters happy

21. 3 Customers…
You’ve got some people to give something to, so give them something
What First phase application – make sure you launch it on
a positive SLA
Features may be lacking, but it needs to be up!
AWS Beanstalk – sow the seed, don’t worry about
complex operations yet
Multi-AZ – small instances, but highly available
Take-away
Deliver something simple, deliver it well
Keep those early adopters happy

22. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
Application package is deployed into Beanstalk

23. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
Which creates the container in EC2
User Application
Application Service
HTTP Service
Language Interpreter
Operating System
Host

24. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
Beanstalk takes care of the environment…

25. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…adding Elastic Load Balancer…

26. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…Auto Scaling groups

27. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…and launching instances

28. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…all wired into the Beanstalk framework

29. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…and published under a CNAME

30. Elastic Beanstalk Tools CloudFormation
…with logs and app versions held in S3

31. 4 Stuff breaks….
Inevitably, 3am on a Saturday night, things start to break….

32. 4 Stuff breaks….
Inevitably, 3am on a Saturday night, things start to break….
What Your database grew – you haven’t optimised it
Your application is naïve – it doesn’t cache anything
AWS You started on small instances – up them. You’ve
plenty to play with
Take-away
Engineering doesn’t happen overnight
With AWS you bought some time – 4-6wks on the
clock to make life easy again

34. 5 Survival…
Got customers, demand is growing and now have functionality to deliver

35. 5 Survival…
Got customers, demand is growing and now have functionality to deliver
What Optimise the data layer
Size instance types properly
AWS Reserve instances – reduce some cost now
Build dev-test disposable environments - Need to
test things before we deliver (Beanstalk,
CloudFormation)
Take-away We bought time to pay down technical debt
Reduced costs, started to act like a real
outfit

36. 6 Resilience…
Cold sweats at 2.30am – service outage – we could have lost everything!

37. 6 Resilience…
Cold sweats at 2.30am – service outage – we could have lost everything!
What How resilient is my RDS setup?
What are my snapshot strategies?
What is my point in time recovery period for RDS?
AWS RDS resiliency
S3 snapshots and EBS/AMI management
Take-away Few clicks (and a little more cost) and it’s taken care
of
35 days of backup history on RDS
Slave failover - automatic

39. 7 Scale…
You have customers from the real world, and they are EVERYWHERE

40. 7 Scale…
You have customers from the real world, and they are EVERYWHERE
What Now your application is your bottleneck
App hits are very high, database is fine
Do the bare minimum of heavy lifting in your application
AWS CDN static content served from application CMSs
CDN dynamic content where you can, play with very low TTLs
Review Azs, ASGs for origin servers
Take-away Push load away from your core application
Again, buy time (spend more time on features)
Keeping reviewing so you don’t accrue too much technical
debt

41. 9 Automate…
You grew your service, now focus on ‘supportability ratio’

42. 9 Automate…
You grew your service, now focus on ‘supportability ratio’
What More customers to less staff is better – the ratio
Focus on tools and automation to keep your team lean
Build a DevOps team (you have one by now anyway!)
CLI, APIs
AWS
CloudFormation, CloudInit
Take-away No more 2.30am problems
DevOps from iPhone (on a Friday night at the pub)