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How do I get started as a Personal Chef?

Getting started with EC2 and SOA

  • I want to write a web app that deploys to EC2, but not having any prior experience I'm struggling to find the info I need to get started. My problem here really is that I have an experimental project I want to do, but I'm experimenting with a lot of things at once and it's hard to orient myself. I've been working as a software developer for a while, but I haven't done web programming in a long time, and my intent here is to get a feel for the nitty-gritty of creating a distributed web service. What I'm imagining in my head is an app (in my case, one written in a JVM language) that composes several specialized services, and ideally incorporates some sort of self-monitoring and automatic self-scaling depending on load. My questions are: 1. How do I get started with EC2? It seems like there are a lot of intro tutorials to show people how to throw up a simple, monolithic app on a single instance using the AWS console, and then a lot of more advanced material aimed at people who are familiar with the service, and not much in between to guide someone like me towards my goal. I suppose I could just dive into familiarizing myself with the EC2 API, but I'd like something a little more structured than that. 2. Service-Oriented Architecture sounds nice, but how are projects exemplifying those principles organized in practice? Is each specialized service essentially its own hermetic project/repository? How does deployment work when your functionality is spread across several projects? Do you use something like chef-solo to prepare a VM, or is the AWS API sufficient? How are test suites organized? Are projects like these generally tightly coupled to the specifics of EC2, or is it worth creating a more general interface to abstract away the specifics of the hosting solution? 3. For the monitoring and load balancing elements, what drives the creation of specialized services like the ones that Netflix maintains versus just using Amazon's services? Sorry, I know that's actually a lot of questions, but I'm having a hard time even figuring out what to ask given the breadth of the topic. Your help is very much appreciated.

  • Answer:

    My EC2-hosted app is, at this exact moment, serving a touch over 600,000 requests per minute. This year it varies from 150K to 1.2MM req/minute. 1) Just get started. Dive in with small instances. Figure out how to use CloudFormation and Auto Scaling Groups to deploy a simple app and have it respond to load. This will get you a long ways, though if you have success you'll probably need to implement predictive scaling, rather than the reactive capabilities that are built into EC2. I didn't find any documentation that was better than Amazon's, and I looked hard for it. 2) this is personal preference. Each service must work on its own, and have it's own tests, but I don't think it matters much how you organize it. You'll want to use some sort of configuration management and orchestration tools (chef, ansible, puppet, salt, whatever) to keep your sanity. Amazon's OpsWorks is basically Chef, but I've never used it so I can't comment on it's utility. 3) Amazon's monitoring is close to useless. Low granularity data, little history, hard to query, limited alerting options. You'll need more information to operate at scale. For load-balancing, I use haproxy on a bunch of instances scattered over many regions and AZs, and use Akamai GTM to balance the traffic to the load balancers. That said, ELBs work well enough for a lot of purposes. If you're going to run your app on EC2, make sure you understand how to scale up and down automatically, and make sure your app is designed to withstand any piece of the application getting shot in the head (or simply crippled) at random. If you don't do that, there's no benefit to the platform.

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Seconding askmehow that a PaaS like Heroku or https://www.appfog.com/ is more beginner-friendly than jumping straight into EC2. Netflix is unusually open about the architecture - see their http://techblog.netflix.com/ and Adrian Cockcroft's http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco. http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/02/netflix-api-optimization outlines their redesigned API. Why use a custom load balancer like HAProxy or Nginx? Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) don't support weighted or least-connection algorithms, URL-based routing, or advanced health checks. They also can't be used for the apex of a domain (unless you use Amazon Route 53 for DNS) and take a while to scale up in response to sudden load increases. If none of those matter to you, they're great.

djb

I'd love answers to several of these questions myself, but I did want to point you at one thing that you might find educational if you haven't looked at it already: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/, which is the relatively turnkey self-monitoring auto-scaling AWS solution. The base technology is deploying a package containing application code (java, PHP, node.js, python, ruby in ZIP , WAR, etc.) to a number of ec2 instances behind a load balancer.

jjwiseman

At its core, EC2 is just providing a virtual machine, typically running Linux or Windows (though there are other options). The APIs and fancy stuff like autoscaling, virtual private cloud, load balancing, etc. can mostly be looked at as layers on top of that. So I'd recommend just firing up a single instance and playing with it to get your feet wet. You can do everything you need from the web console, no need to touch the API. Then as your project needs it, you can start bringing in the other stuff. Beanstalk is a decent way to get things up and running quickly but sometimes I feel like it brings in a bunch of complexity you don't need when you're just starting out.

primethyme

You may want to look into using heroku for hosting your web application. Heroku runs on AWS but shields you from all of the infrastructure complexity. If you need to take advantage of other AWS services you can either programmatically or by moving your app onto an EC2 instance that you maintain. Basically it let's you punt on the tough stuff until you need to tackle it.

askmehow

Thanks, everyone, that helps. For what it's worth, I've made several apps that deploy to Heroku, so I feel like I understand that pretty well -- EC2 just seems like a different beast, since the deployment workflow is more low-level than merely taking advantage of some git hooks.

invitapriore

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