Trello has moved to AWS

http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fogbugz-kiln-and-copilot-continue-to-run-on-backup-power-trello-moving-to-amazon-aws.html

by gecko • 14 years ago

124 67 14 years ago

status.fogcreek.com

Killah9115• 14 years ago

Would love to hear about what it took to transition to AWS. Any chance Joel would divulge some of the driving factors (reliability being one)? How about cost? Unlike my paltry webapps, trello gets a lot of activity and no current revenue stream, so I'd love to know more on what the cost difference is between running your own vs in the cloud. How long did it take to move over? Are the old servers being used as backups in the event Amazon has their very rare aws outage?

I know that's a lot of questions, but heck it would be an article I'd love to read and something I believe would be very relevant to the community as well!

thedufer• 14 years ago

> Are the old servers being used as backups in the event Amazon has their very rare aws outage?

AWS is essentially acting as a backup of the old servers, as the datacenter is in danger of losing power.

That said, the cost, reliability, etc. had been carefully thought out, albeit as a somewhat longer-term project than it ended up being. More info will certainly wait at least until the current state of things is cleared up - Fogbugz and Kiln are still in the datacenter.

Killah9115• 14 years ago

Thanks for the info. I know things must be pretty crazy right now. Quite literally in the trenches. Just goes to show what an amazing team behind an amazing product can do. Kudos!

rurounijones• 14 years ago

Be interesting to see how this was migrated, method, what had to be changed, lessons learned etc.

Would also be great to see a follow-on report after a month or so of lessons learned from hosting on AWS vs own infrastructure.

I will also be keeping an eye out to see if it remains as responsive.

Killah9115• 14 years ago

What would be really interesting is if they thought of a Hybrid-Cloud approach. I recall Joel talking about adding a new server every week due to Trello's ever growing popularity during his presentation at Startup School. Being able to spool up on-demand should really help with performance or for times when the datacenter is flooded. But wouldn't it be more cost effective to run it on your hardware during off-peak times and spool up some new servers on AWS when performance starts to lag?

Disclaimer: I'm a Trello fanboy, it's like having container classes in STL, only more visual!

gecko6• 14 years ago

Technically, it is running hybrid now, albeit for somewhat silly reasons: the mail server is still at Peer1.

gecko6• 14 years ago

There's a little bit more information in the last status post, plus a picture of Fog Creek cofounder Michael Pryor hauling 5-gallon jugs of diesel up 17 flights of stairs. (We have other employees down there, too, and I know Stack Exchange's NYC employees were excited to help out, so they're probably there by now, too.) http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/diesel-bucket-brigade-mai...

Killah9115• 14 years ago

Wow, that's going beyond the extra mile. I'm pretty far from NYC but if I were closer I'd give you guys a hand. In lieu of that, any possibility of a "Trello Hurricane fund" which we can donate to? Would give appreciative users like me a chance to help pitch in for a team and product which has already helped so much. Maybe it'll amount to just enough for lunch or something, but I for one would feel much better knowing that I contributed a little...

d3ad1ysp0rk• 14 years ago

I think there are many, many better places to donate than a profitable company who had to do a little hard labor because they didn't have a second datacenter like everyone suggests.

ivany• 14 years ago

Are there any safety issues associated with hauling a bucket of diesel up a staircase? I know it's not as volatile as gasoline but it's still not exactly the most fire-safe substance. Are they literally 5-gallon pails, or are they sealed containers?

gecko6• 14 years ago

    Are there any safety issues associated with hauling a bucket of diesel
    up a staircase?

It's flammable and slippery. Wear boots, and I suggest this is a good day to quit smoking.

    I know it's not as volatile as gasoline but it's still not exactly
    the most fire-safe substance. Are they literally 5-gallon pails,
    or are they sealed containers?

They are open buckets we store the cleaning supplies for the fish tank in. And also now gasoline.

grey-area• 14 years ago

I'm sure you've thought of this, but now that you're up and running, isn't it possible to buy/hire a pump, run it off the electricity from the already running generators, and pump it up from street level instead, instead of walking up stairs with buckets?

Dobbs• 14 years ago

The pump is underwater.

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

They probably (only) need a couple of gallons per hour.

If they can't tie into their existing fuel infrastructure, hauling it up the ~150 to 200 feet of stairs bit by bit is probably easier than trying to source and install something temporary.

gecko6• 14 years ago

They've thought of that. Kind of fun to find new sets of industrial pumps post-hurricane though.

jellicle• 14 years ago

It's very difficult to pump liquids up long distances. You can't suck liquids up more than 25 feet high, and while you can push it higher, you need a big pump and strong hoses/pipes, etc. Practically what you end up with is a series of smaller pumps. The water supply to tall buildings is a difficult bit of engineering on its own.

Anyway, the short answer is no, it's not at all easy to pump anything up 17 stories. You're talking about 8 or more pumps and appropriate hoses curling up the staircases, making them impassable... but people need those stairs.

dbecker• 14 years ago

Perhaps the Fog Creek staff is just really fit, but it seems like it would have made sense to hire some burly mover dudes to haul gasoline up stairs.

gadders2• 14 years ago

Play some Zumba music and charge for it.

RobAley3• 14 years ago

When FogBugz on Demand launched, Joel touted 2 data centers[1] , in NY and LA, "for the once-in-a-lifetime case of an entire data center blowing up". What happened to the second data center?

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lHEK939...

andyjohnson03• 14 years ago

No need to post a link to the Google cache. The original source [1] contains the same text. I don't think that there is much risk that they might ninja-edit the five year-old announcement to change the claim about redundancy.

My guess is that the second data centre was there, but failover didn't work for some reason. It would be good to know the reason, though.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/09.html

Edit: Politeness

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Not entirely related, but regarding the backup fuel situation: how long does 1 "bucket" of fuel keep the power going for and what is the cost of 1 bucket of fuel?

gecko6• 14 years ago

This information is from earlier today, so I don't know how accurate it is, but:

  - They burn 44 gallons per hour
  - The tank adjacent to the generator holds ~400 gallons
  - Gas is currently VERY expensive, but I don't have a real number for you at
    the moment.

jspthrowaway• 14 years ago

Diesel, on-highway in New England, is averaging $4.205/gal[1] (probably more in the city, especially more in a disaster situation). Applying your information to the above question and assuming they can get just shy of five gallons per bucket, it's probably a fair estimate that each bucket carries more than $20 of diesel fuel and accounts for seven minutes of generator time. So, about $3 per minute or 5.1 cents every second.

Really puts things in perspective.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/gasdiesel/

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

They really need around 1/2 megawatt?

Wow.

fr0sty• 14 years ago

Nit-pick: These generators burn diesel not, gas.

And to the poster below: 500kw generator is not unreasonable for a fully populated datacenter. That is power and cooling, remember.

modarts• 14 years ago

Unrelated to the post, but I hope you guys are all doing okay out there.

I have a huge amount of respect and appreciation for the level of commitment you have for your customers, despite these horrific circumstances. Stay safe!

rdl• 14 years ago

"Trello is in the process of being moved to Amazon AWS where it will not be affected by further data center issues."

I guess that's called the power of positive thinking?

sturadnidge• 14 years ago

Oh, the irony. Interesting they didn't move to Azure though.

dagw• 14 years ago

Unlike their other products trello isn't .Net based. It runs on a node.js/mongoDB/Redis (and I'm guessing Linux) stack . My understanding was that they're using Trello as a test platform for playing with and evaluating different new technologies.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

..or the power of a really long night with very sore muscles.

atesti• 14 years ago

So they kind of move some business away from Peer 1 after all this bucket brigade job? Not nice.

I hope they move Trello back to "real" servers and not this AWS, once the datacenter is stabilized.

I think that AWS is overrated and overpriced and it's a big asset of FogCreek to still use real data centers, after all they started this thing before AWS even existed. I don't know if StackExchange or FogBugz would run so good on these AWS-servers with bad IO.

It's great though if they now have the chance to quickly overflow Trello to AWS in case of problems or high demands and buy a new correctly-priced, powerful server to put at Peer 1 a week later!

dancryer• 14 years ago

Did they move to AWS to ensure that their services go down more efficiently next time there's a hint of a natural disaster?

zwily• 14 years ago

You do know that AWS did not go down during Sandy, right?

/me knocks on wood

Xylakant2• 14 years ago

Well, but it's not like AWS didn't have its share of downtime in the last couple of weeks. Back then the recommendation of the arm-chair-admins was to move to dedicated hardware you own. Oh the irony.

Tyrannosaurs• 14 years ago

I'd be interested to know whether there has been a significant surge in demand for AWS since Sandy hit.

Having the cloud as your back up makes a lot of sense but if everyone did it could it cope with the additional demand? Sure the AWS infrastructure is massive but I'm guessing the load that would be dumped on it if a significant chunk of New York's web hosting was suddenly moved across would be massive.

mgamer• 14 years ago

I wonder, how technically can you move something like Trello to AWS in such short period of time? Do you think they had a plan prepared for such contingency?

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

Haven't we seen more AWS outage issues than "east coast shutdown"-level storms over the past, oh, say, 5 years?

EDIT: Thinking now this may be a temporary move, not a permanent one. As such, it probably makes sense to have a tested process to be able to move between cloud/dedicated/whatever as quickly and painlessly as possible.

acdha2• 14 years ago

We've seen many people who failed to read AWS' documentation and put all of their services in one data center. If you follow Amazon's guidelines and used multiple AZs (i.e. if you use RDS check that box), you've had very little (~20 minutes) downtime; if you went multi-region it's even less.

It's not like this is a well-hidden secret - head over to AWS's whitepaper section

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices....

“Be a pessimist when designing architectures in the cloud”

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Web_Hosting_Best_Prac...

“As the AWS web hosting architecture diagram in this paper shows, we recommend that you deploy EC2 hosts across multiple Availability Zones to make your web application more fault-tolerant.”

mgkimsal2• 14 years ago

But... didn't we also have some comments before about how Amazon's own control panel systems are all in one data center? If Amazon themselves don't 'get this right', perhaps it's because it's too hard, and they need to take steps to make this easier (or indeed automatic, and charge a premium)?

griffordson• 14 years ago

Do you know something that Netflix doesn't? They avoid EBS dependencies for a reason:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-...

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/10/post-mortem-of-october-2...

calinet6• 14 years ago

To be fair, some of those AWS outages were "east coast shutdown"-level storms.

amalag• 14 years ago

The real question is "is it permanent?"

Trello has moved to AWS

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