AWS Summit 2011: Customer Presentation - Forward Internet Group

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 1

Really Rapid Deployment

Fred George

Forward Internet Group, London

fred.george@forward.co.uk

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 2

Experiences at...

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 3

forwardtechnology.co.uk

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 4

Cost Tradeoff

Defect

Prevention

Fast

Failure

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

Key Enablers

✦Focus on cycle time (and Fast Failure)

✦Risk-oriented culture

✦Focus on business metrics by developers

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✦Rapid creation of new servers

✦Redundancy for capacity and reliability

✦ Including DNS updates

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 6

Forward “Hockey Stick”

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

Experimentation drives

Innovation✦Forward experimented with “Cloud”

✦AWS VM up in 5 minutes

✦Data center VM up in 1/2 day

✦ IT controversy ensued

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Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd 8

CustomerDevelopersIT Support✦Self-contained group to:

✦Self-configure servers

✦Self-deploy (often)

✦Self-monitor & -maintain

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

AWS Features We Use

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Agency

✦ Over 20 EC2

instances

✦ node.js

✦ 20M visitors/day

✦ ELB across

different zones

✦ S3 & CloudFront

for assets

uSwitch

✦Original .NET

✦Migrating tech to

Ruby, Clojure,

MongoDB

✦20 EC2 instances

✦+ ELB, S3, RDS,

CloudFront

InvisibleHand

✦EC2 for stack

✦Ruby, MySQL,

MongoDB

✦EBS for DB backup

✦S3 to snapshot

✦Autoscaling for

traffic spikes

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

Features We Want

✦DNS - Like UltraDNS (location specific)

✦Better Web console

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✦Ruby-, Clojure-specific environments

Features We Don’t/Won’t

Use

Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

Statistics -- Tale of the

Tape✦20M requests per day

✦At least 50 EC2 instances running at any given

time

✦Serving

✦200 clients

✦30 countries

✦25 languages

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Copyright © 2011 by Forward Internet Group, Ltd

Best Practices

✦Use multiple availability zones and regions

✦For uptime

✦Use Autoscaling for spikes

✦EC2 instances disposable

✦Build your architecture to accommodate losses

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