Building Modular Apps with Ruby & AWS

Transcript

1. Building Modular Apps with Ruby & AWS Kyle Fox /

   @kylefox YEGRB / November 20, 2012

2. Carbonmade in a nutshell • Artists signup & build a

   portfolio (back-end) • People visit artists’ portfolios (front-end)

3. Artist Manage Portfolio Visitors View Portfolio Monolith! Massive .NET app

   & database server Admin Junk Reports, customer support, etc.

4. The Problems I got 99 problems and they’re all architecture

   related.

5. Massive Rackspace Server • Dedicated = Expensive • Slow to

   provision new hardware • Resource contention

6. Monolithic Design • Single point of failure • Bottleneck is

   EVERYTHING • Break once, break everywhere • Tight coupling = house of cards

7. Workflow Issues • Hard to find .NET developers • Editing

   files over FTP • Deploys required compilation, or something dumb like that • Difficult to write tests

8. what to do?

9. let’s try a SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

10. A fancy way of saying Let’s break the app into

    a bunch of isolated, single-responsibility components! And have them work together over black-box APIs. Amazon’s Web Services are great for this purpose.

11. Advantages of a SOA • Avoids a single point of

    failure • Easier to scale parts that need scaling • Makes infrastructure refactoring a breeze • Decoupled by design • Easier to rebuild in phases than all at once

12. AWS we’ll use • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) • Server

    Virtualization & Load Balancing • Simple Storage Service (S3) • Persistent Data Storage • CloudFront (CF) • Content Delivery Network • Simple Queue Service (SQS) • Message Queue • Simple Notification Service (SNS) • Broadcast Notifications (pubsub)

13. Step #1 Remove public portfolio rendering from monolithic .NET app

14. Visitors View Portfolio .NET Database & Back-end tools Sinatra •EC2

    •Stateless (no database) •Reads from API •Renders data in Liquid templates Get /projects/123 {project: ... }

15. Good things • Moved some traffic off back-end • Designed

    an API • Moved templates to Liquid! • Git & automated deployment

16. Bad things • Single point of failure • No caching

    • No failover / redundancy • App logic (data fetching & theme rendering) is embedded in a web framework. Gross.

17. Step #2 Many Sinatra apps & carbonmade gem

18. EC2 Load Balancer Visitors View Portfolio .NET Database & Back-end

    tools Sinatra Sinatra Sinatra Cache Huge membase cluster Carbonmade Gem High-memory EC2 instances Multiple Portfolio Servers

19. EC2 Load Balancer Visitors View Portfolio .NET Database & Back-end

    tools Sinatra Sinatra Sinatra Cache Huge membase cluster Carbonmade Gem Amazon SQS Cache invalidation messages Queue message when portfolio updated Poll for messages Delete from cache Cache Invalidation
20. None

21. Step #3 Build a Theme Park ...wait, huh?

22. Designers shouldn’t need to deploy to server clusters When all

    they’re doing is changing some CSS

23. ...well, they should but they refused.

24. In the land of the noble beaver where the rivers

    run wild with maple syrup, there lives a ne young gentleman named Kyle Fox. He's been developing nifty things for us in the moose-plagued landscape of Edmonton, Alberta since the beginning of 2011. At present he is working his sweet magic on our iPad app while wrestling bears, sipping ne Canadian whiskeys and tapping every last maple tree. We raise our glasses in celebration of his big day and thank him for being such a funny and valued member of Team Carbonmade. Happy birthday, eh?

25. Theme Park • A web-based tool for editing themes •

    Writes files (HTML/CSS/JS) directly to S3 • Asset bundling • Versioning • Deployments

26. ThemePark Online Editor Amazon S3 Used as CloudFront origin HTML

    CSS JS Liquid Files theme-<id>-<revision>.zip Publishing a theme

27. ThemePark Online Editor Amazon S3 Used as CloudFront origin HTML

    CSS JS Liquid Files theme-<id>-<revision>.zip Amazon SNS Theme Updated! Post to SNS

28. ThemePark Online Editor Amazon S3 Used as CloudFront origin HTML

    CSS JS Liquid Files theme-<id>-<revision>.zip Amazon SNS Theme Updated! Post to SNS Sinatra Sinatra Sinatra Theme Updated! Notify Subscribers

29. ThemePark Online Editor Amazon S3 Used as CloudFront origin HTML

    CSS JS Liquid Files theme-<id>-<revision>.zip Amazon SNS Theme Updated! Post to SNS Sinatra Sinatra Sinatra Theme Updated! Notify Subscribers Download templates

30. Publishing an SNS Message

31. Receiving an SNS Message

32. In conclusion Breaking up apps: • Makes testing & refactoring

    easier • Let’s you scale components individually & appropriately • Gives you freedom to drastically change how pieces work • Makes fault-tolerance & failover easier • AWS is a cheap & easy way to do this!