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