Bringing back active-active architectures

Do you have high uptime requirements for your serverless applications? Are your users geographically distributed, either within a geographic region or across the globe? Active-active failover architectures address these challenges and are cheaper in serverless architectures than in traditional applications.

In this talk, you learn a reusable pattern for implementing an application that runs in multiple regions on the same cloud service provider. Performance is compared to traditional architectures, and solutions to the major challenges of data, deployment, and DNS are provided. Finally, special considerations for security, compliance, and observability are addressed.

This advanced-level talk is for developers already familiar with serverless architectures who need greater uptime without sacrificing performance. Attendees should expect to leave with the knowledge and confidence to build and deploy active-active multi-region architectures in their own serverless applications. Although specific tools are used to present a working solution, the concepts can be applied across vendors.

Transcript

1. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 Active-active architectures Moar Serverless - 12 August 2021
2. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 2 What you will learn • How are they different for serverless ? • What use cases are they good for ? • What use cases are they bad for ? • Are they worth it for you ? • Q&A
3. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 3 Active-active architectures • Introductio n • Challenge s • Data layer option s • Deploymen t • DN S • Log s • Solution overview
4. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 4 Introduction
5. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 5 Who am I? • Head of DA at Faun a • Former AWS Serverless D A • Previous SaaS startup co-founde r • Global active-active architectur e • Including telecom interconnects!
6. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 6 What is an active-active architecture? Your entire app 
 (us-east-2 )
7. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 7 What is an active-active architecture? Your entire app 
 (us-east-2 ) Also your entire app 
 (us-west-2 )
8. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 8 Zero-downtime Real-time RPO/RTO Little to no data loss Classical benefits
9. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 9 Classical benefits Zero-downtime Real-time RPO/RTO Little to no data loss Serverless already has this!
10. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 10 Serverless benefits Satisfy compliance requirements Reduce latency Minimal increase 
 in spending
11. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 11 Challenges
12. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 12 Challenges DNS Data layer Deployment
13. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 13 Data layer options
14. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 14 RDBMS
15. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 15 DynamoDB Global Tables fauna.link/ddb-acid
16. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 16 Fauna fauna.link/moar-serverless db.fauna.com
17. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 17 Fauna fauna.link/calvin
18. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 18 Deployment
19. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 19 Always use a framework!
20. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 20 Always use a framework!
21. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 21 Use a framework within a pipeline circleci.com/developer/orbs
22. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 22 Deployment strategies
23. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 23 CICY(olo)
24. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 24 CICY(olo)
25. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 25 Regional canary
26. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 26 Regional canary
27. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 27 Regional canary
28. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 28 Canary region
29. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 29 Canary region
30. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 30 Canary region
31. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 31 Interregional canaries
32. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 32 Interregional canaries
33. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 33 Interregional canaries
34. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 34 DNS
35. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 35 DNS
36. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 36 Logs
37. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 37 Logs • Aggregate logs across region s • Use Lambda extensions to ship logs to the aggregato r • This is actually cheaper than CloudWatch Logs ! • CWL - $530/T B • KDF + S3 - $52/TB fauna.link/aa-logs
38. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 38 Solution overview
39. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 39 Traditional applications fauna.link/aws-dr
40. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 40 Serverless applications AWS Cloud us-west-2 us-east-2
41. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 41 Serverless applications AWS Cloud us-west-2 us-east-2
42. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 42 Next-gen serverless
43. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 43 Next-gen serverless
44. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 44 Client serverless
45. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 45 Review • Introductio n • Challenge s • Data layer option s • Deploymen t • DN S • Log s • Solution overview
46. Confidential © Fauna, Inc. 2020 46 Thank you! • Go build something! ◦ fauna.link/labs • Follow us on Twitch: ◦ FaunaInc ◦ RobSutter • Follow us on Twitter: ◦ @fauna ◦ @rts_rob