How we built Heroku-like PaaS over AWS with just Python

We get high level of customizability with IaaS like AWS and utmost convenience with PaaS like Heroku. We blended the benefits of these two and this talk is about sharing the journey.

You will learn about our journey of building a simple CLI tool for creating and deploying services with a single command.

Transcript

1. How we built Heroku-like PaaS over AWS with just Python Senthil V S VP Engineering
2. Ready for questions?
3. Cook or Buy
4. Tailor-made or Readymade
5. Agenda • Definitions • IaaS • PaaS • Simpl: Microservices based scalable platform • Simplicity of PaaS vs Sophistication of IaaS • Our approach • Technical details, code, demo
6. IaaS
7. PaaS
8. Simpl architecture Streaming Platform Services Streaming Platform Streaming Platform Streaming Platform Data Pipeline Dashboards Analytics ML models Merchant Apps Simpl Website Different tech stacks Scalability requirements Security requirements
9. PaaS is force-fitting IaaS is hard What did we do…
10. Or something in-between Cook or Buy
11. Build a PaaS on IaaS
12. Build a PaaS on IaaS Whaaaat??? Don’t panic. Let’s see it in action
13. Demo Creating a service Deploying the service Scaling it Monitoring & logs
14. Cloudlift • Built by two developers at Simpl & in production use • Used in a heroku style. (Yeah. You can call it heroic style ;)) • Hides the complexity • Fully customizable
15. Cloudlift • Containerized services • Infrastructure as code • Cloudformation • ECS • Simpl specific conventions • Environment == ECS Cluster • Service == [ECS service] • Deployment • Environment • Config • Image • Python based command line tool
16. What happens on deploy_service ? Push local docker 
 image to ECR Ensure S3 has all required config env.sample Docker registry ECR S3 bucket configuration.simpl Update the task definition with image version & env vars ECS runs new containers with updated version Stops the old version once new are up ★ The service name is guessed from current dir ★ image name is same as repo name in 
 spinal case without simpl- prefix ★ latest version is picked to push 1 2 3 4 5
17. Show me code
18. Learnings
19. ECS is not batteries-included. Simple and does the job. Well.
20. env.sample Why?
21. THE feature of Cloudformation: Idempotency
22. Never hand-code Cloudformation template
23. Testing infra code. How?
24. Version your commands
 
 and store it as metadata with cloudformation templates
25. Bake-in monitoring and alerts
26. Service should have only one way to configure Environment variables Do you smell?
27. Treat secrets and other configurations same.
28. Q & A