AWS Design Patterns at Anki
Advanced AWS Meetup
1/21/2014
Ben Whaley | @iAmTheWhaley | ben@anki.com
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Work for Anki!
Anki needs beta testers!
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● Anki and AWS
● Application and Systems design
● Deployment and Provisioning
● Demo
● Partnerships
Overview
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No content
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Services, analytics and infrastructure
● Provides web & analytics services for
Anki
● Example services:
○ Gameplay diagnostics
○ Game replays
○ Customer service platform
○ Future Anki DRIVE enhancements
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Application design
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● Application processes are stateless
Application design
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● Application processes are stateless
● Loose coupling among services
Application design
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● Application processes are stateless
● Loose coupling among services
● Configuration is in the environment
Application design
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● Application processes are stateless
● Loose coupling among services
● Configuration is in the environment
● Built for continuous deployment
Application design
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Systems design
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● n+2 redundancy
Systems design
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Systems design
● n+2 redundancy
● Compute resources are ephemeral
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Systems design
● n+2 redundancy
● Compute resources are ephemeral
● Managed services preferred
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Systems design
● n+2 redundancy
● Compute resources are ephemeral
● Managed services preferred
● Infrastructure as code
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Systems design
● n+2 redundancy
● Compute resources are ephemeral
● Managed services preferred
● Infrastructure as code
● Single purpose VPCs
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Systems design
● n+2 redundancy
● Compute resources are ephemeral
● Managed services preferred
● Infrastructure as code
● Single purpose VPCs
● Contract between backing resources and
applications
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Backing resources
Public Web Services
ELBs
Infrastructure Services
Bastion, NAT, CM, Metrics
Private Web Services
Persistence
VPC
External AWS Services
S3, SQS, SNS
Inbound requests
from clients
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Deployment and Provisioning
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Goal: Continuous deployment
Source
Repo
commit GitHub
Web Hook
Deploy
Worker
Old Release
Remains
Running
Integration
Tests
Deploy to
Integration
Deploy to
Production
Integration
tests pass
SQS
New
Release
Live
Integration
tests fail
Notify
Check for
commits
Commit
found
DNS Change
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Deployment and Provisioning
● New code, new instances
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Deployment and Provisioning
● New code, new instances
● Instance store-backed AMIs built with
Packer
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● New code, new instances
● Instance store-backed AMIs built with
Packer
● AMIs ship with base Docker containers
Deployment and Provisioning
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Deployment and Provisioning
● New code, new instances
● Instance store-backed AMIs built with
Packer
● AMIs ship with base Docker containers
● Instances provisioned with Ansible
● Base container, service container, release
container
● Local dev == Production
● Exceptional community
● Challenges
○ Rapidly changing
○ Logging
○ Debugging
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● Uses troposphere library to create
CloudFormation templates
● Reusable resource templates
● Saves app configuration as json files in S3
● Creates CF stacks & kicks off instance
provisioning
● Supports multiple deployments & releases
Custom deployment tool
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● IAM roles and policies created via
CloudFormation
● Intra-VPC traffic authorized by SG ID
● Precise subnetting allows for future network
ACLs
● … some credentials still laying around in
plain text
On security