Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from-10-years-of-aws.html

by yarapavan • 10 years ago

169 24 10 years ago

yarapavan• 10 years ago

James Hamilton listed some of the highlights over the last decade at his blog - http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/a-decade-of-innovat...

jcrites• 10 years ago

James has put out a lot of great material. He's given a talk series and wrote a conference paper called "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" which is a trove of valuable design insights:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... (somewhat condensed)

Slides from a talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf

He writes some of the more practical and useful advice I've seen about how to run a successful business based on high-scale distributed systems.

One of his mnemonics that's stuck with me is the "Four Rs" of recovery-oriented computing: Restart, Reboot, Reimage, Replace (slide 6 in PDF). A human shouldn't be engaged to troubleshoot a problem until the platform has first tried in successing to restart the software, reboot the OS, re-image the machine, and finally replace the hardware entirely. After these auto-recovery steps have failed, only then is it time to engage a human. He describes the connection between these techniques and significantly lower operations costs.

axelfontaine• 10 years ago

"A good litmus test has been that if you need to SSH into a server or an instance, you still have more to automate."

Amen. We couldn't agree more: https://boxfuse.com/blog/no-ssh

bluecmd• 10 years ago

So, with No SSH - how do you debug that one-off problem that is only on machine abc12? I'm not talking about mutating, I'm talking about attaching gdb to the process while it's handling requests. I'm talking about collecting CPU profiling information from production. Stuff like that.

mhw• 10 years ago

Immutable Infrastructure is the modern day "have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

autotune4• 10 years ago

You could probably have a central logging service like graylog or logstash that automatically collects that information and just sort through the logs that way.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

https://speakerdeck.com/niteshkant/distributed-tracing-at-ne...

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/scalable-logging-and-tra...

https://github.com/Netflix/vector

Not terribly easy, but possible. I agree that "never have to SSH" is a bad target because there will always be edge cases, but for the majority of things it's possible to troubleshoot at the cluster level given immutable infrastructure; all the systems will be doing the exact same thing given an input. Reality shows that this is a bit idealistic, but if you start finding that e.g. A certain set of requests cause weird behavior, you can look at what makes those requests different, then set up some routing logic to send them to a debug farm (using something like https://github.com/Netflix/zuul ).

LinuxBender• 10 years ago

Proposal:

Instead of ssh vs. no-ssh debate, how about:

* Use SSH AllowGroups to limit logins to the development manager/lead or on-call engineer

* with a policy that for each time you have to call them beyond N times per week, you have to buy their team a round of drinks of their choosing?

Deal?

jimbokun• 10 years ago

"Primitives not frameworks"

This is why Amazon beat Google in the "as a Service" space. Google provided a framework with AppEngine, but customers wanted the flexibility of the primitives offered by AWS.

nopzor2• 10 years ago

I think that Amazon being first in 2005/2006 helped a lot, too. Google now provides "primitives" through GCE. I think Google realizes that the future is GCE not GAE.

vgt• 10 years ago

I think there's tremendous value still in GAE. To this day the fact that a company the size of Snapchat is able to operate on a PaaS, with virtually no ops people, is STILL a game-changer. The fact that it's still true 3+ years in is equally as impressive.

The narrative shifted away from PaaS for a number of reasons, but the value prop is still present.

(Disclaimer: work on BigQuery, a DBaaS, which is, in my opinion, is clearly the future)

fensterblick• 10 years ago

But Amazon wasn't the first. The Sun Grid was first (launched in March 2006).

eranation• 10 years ago

Exactly

Offer IaaS first, the PaaS. Google had it backward.

While AWS does have a small vendor lock in too, in the end it's still recognizable , I mean it's doable for example to move an AWS architecture to open stack without a major code rewrite. If you built your web app on GAE and GWT however, your investment to move it out of Google will be much bigger.

rodionos• 10 years ago

You have to give full credit to AWS for inventing previously unknown pricing models. In some cases, it was actually the pricing model that created new use cases. Glacier and S3 comes to mind.

jeffbarr• 10 years ago

That's a very important observation. When I describe AWS to audiences I always make clear that it is a combination of a technology and a business model.

Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services

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