Building apps with AWS

Overview

• Cloud providers offer building blocks for a variety of needs
• various degrees of cloud integration, for legacy apps or cloud native ones

A cloud native app

• Visibility as a service for public cloud
• web app hosted in S3
• agents on EC2 instances to tap traffic
• agents on EC2 instance with monitoring tools
• centralized backend in Amazon Cloud
• Salt Stack - for infrastructure

Subsystem

• Users are creating projects which have permissions associated
• Automated tests can fail and cleanup is not done - resources become orphan
• A cleanup system to take care of the leftovers

Building blocks (Services)

• Lambda
• API Gateway
• IAM
• DynamoDB
• Cloudwatch Logs and Events

Some lessons

Good

• simple deployment, with serverlss no need to worry about provisioning
• can reduce cost for infrastructure
• most of the time scales quickly and automatically

Bad

• sometimes Amazon throttles resources if they think something malicious is going on
• any downtime for the cloud provider will directly impact the app
• lambda may be too slow for time critical operations, caller (e.g. web app) needs to be designed to be responsive. cold start.
• execution time for lambdas limited to 5 mins by Amazon
• debugging for Amazon lambdas is difficult

So-so

• design with the assumption everything will fail (timeouts, network issues etc), increases complexity

Find out more

• explore AWS services, try the free tier and the labs:

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

https://aws.amazon.com/training/self-paced-labs/

• competition: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud