Service Discovery: From Classic to VPC

As SeatGeek's traffic continues to grow, so too has its infrastructure needs. Recent expansion of the operations team has allowed us to replace our existing service discovery solution with Consul, improving our ability to scale and manage an elastic cloud environment. At the same time,we saw this opportunity to migrate from EC2 Classic to VPC and take advantage of AWS's latest offerings.

In this talk, we will discuss Consul, the problems it has solved, and adoption issues that surfaced along the way. In addition, we will also highlight our experiences with VPC, including setup, routing, access control, and migration with the extremely useful EC2 ClassicLink.

PDF with presenter notes and links can be found here:
http://bit.ly/1OH7HC0

Transcript

1. Service Discovery: From Classic to VPC Speaker: Mark Corwin Systems Engineer @ SeatGeek
2. Myself Mark Corwin Systems Engineer, SeatGeek @mjcdiggity github.com/mjcdiggity speakerdeck.com/mjcdiggity http://bit.ly/23d0eEH
3. SeatGeek • "Kayak for live events" • Ticket Marketplace • ~8 million users on platform • ~30 Developers, 3 Ops • ~150 Servers • PHP/Python/Go/Ruby/JS • Chef/Ansible • AWS/Heroku/Linode
4. Agenda 1. What is VPC, and why do I care? 2. Setting up a VPC 3. Case Study: Service Discovery at SeatGeek 4. Lessons Learned
5. EC2 Classic • Standard Cloud Offering • Public Nodes with Internet Access • Shared Tenancy • Security controlled by Security Groups
6. VPC • Virtual Private Cloud • Public or Private Nodes • Dedicated or Shared Tenancy • Multiple Security Layers
7. Why VPC? • Network/Security Control • Decrease footprint on open Internet • Flexibility • Latest features and hardware
8. Latest Instance Types http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html
9. Why Now? • Upgrade • Additional Operational Bandwidth • Experience • EC2 ClassicLink
10. SeatGeek VPCs
11. Getting started with VPC http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Scenario1.html
12. Other common VPC scenarios http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Scenarios.html
13. VPC with Public and Private Subnets (NAT) http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Scenario2.html
14. Back to SeatGeek's VPCs
15. Production/Staging Breakdown
16. EC2 ClassicLink • Communicate between EC2 Classic and VPC • Can link to one ClassicLink enabled VPC • Requires enabling in VPC and Instances • 10.0.0.0/16 and 10.0.0.0/8
17. VPN Breakdown
18. Final Look
19. VPC Advice and Wisdom • Overprovision • "Measure twice, cut once" • ClassicLink
20. Case Study: Service Discovery at SeatGeek
21. What is Service Discovery? • Lookup • Registration
22. Consul http://bit.ly/1PDJkVz
23. Old Setup
31. Old Setup Pros: • Simplicity • Good for Static Infrastructure Cons: • Complexity • Single point of failure • Delayed response • Fleet management is difficult
32. Current Setup
42. Consul Cluster
43. Problems Solved • Consul used as Discovery Service • Removes single point of failure • Real time response • Passive solution
44. New Problems • External Services • Consul Template
45. Unbound
46. Consul Template https://github.com/hashicorp/consul-template/issues/331
47. Migration 1. Setup Consul Cluster 2. Register Services in Consul 3. Use Consul for Service Lookup 4. Recycle nodes into VPC
48. Current Progress 1. Setup Consul Cluster 2. Register Services in Consul 3. Use Consul for Service Lookup 4. Recycle nodes into VPC
49. Lessons Learned • Know your applications • DNS/Networking • What problem are you trying to solve?
50. Start using AWS VPC today!
51. We're hiring...
52. https://seatgeek.com/jobs
53. Questions?