wired.com and reddit.com presentation at aws event in nyc

Rajiv Pant / Paul Fisher

VP Technology, Conde Nast DigitalRevolution:Cloud, Co-Authorwww.revolutioncloud.com

Manager of Technology, Wired.com

Revolution:Cloud, Co-Authorwww.revolutioncloud.com

www.revolutioncloud.comwww.revolutioncloud.com

http://www.revolutioncloud.com/





Conde Nast Digital


Conde Nast websites


— About Wired.com

High-Traffic Technology News Website

Millions of Page Views each Day

Numerous Site Components, implemented in Java, Grails, and PHP

Many Disparate Features, including Admin, CMS, and User-Facing Functionality

News Content, Product Reviews, Widgets, etc.


— About Wired.com


— Leveraging of EC2

Rapid Prototyping and Deployment

Wired Widgets



Wired Widgets




Wired Widgets

Dataset Wiki




Wired Widgets

Dataset Wiki

Production CMS Components — Post-Process content and deploy images to S3



These Projects utilized S3 and EC2

Rapid Development via Grails

Production Deployment and integration with stack via CNAME

Critical CMS Workflow Components Rely on S3 for content deployment and user-facing asset access.



Other Administrative Tools — Preparing and Editing Production Content

Product Reviews Application

Began as Simple Admin Tool

Short Timeline and “In-Book” Deadline

Selected EC2 to avoid delays — set-up production environment within a day



EC2 simplified Development and Staging

Deployed and Tested application by duplicating image and environment

Product Reviews Application posed integration challenges:

Major Site Component

Short Timeframe to Go Live



Product Reviews:

Developed Admin Tool and User-Facing Application using Grails

Integrated application via Proxying from internal hosting infrastructure

Solution allowed us to leverage EC2 without limiting functionality or seamlessness of integration



Product Reviews:



Product Reviews — Admin Tool:



What is reddit?•reddit is an online community


TimelineApril 2006 -- S3 for logos

September 2007 -- S3 for thumbnails

November 2008 -- EC2 for batch processing

May 2009 -- EC2 for entire site


What led us to AWS (part 1)

•Needed an easy way to distribute and upload our logo



•Thumbnails!



•Didn’t want to rent another cabinet




•Didn’t want to buy more servers




•Didn’t want to buy more servers

New Servers

New Servers


Imaging and Racking Servers Is A (Sometimes

Fun) Chore


EC2 for Overflow•Used openvpn to create a secure

link to our datacenter for batch processing


Moving to EC2•Started by migrating all data



•Got a complete stack running on EC2



•Got a complete stack running on EC2

•Long Saturday night finishing the migration and “forklifting” the last bits of data


Architecture


Stats•190 Virtual CPUs

•338GB of RAM

•9TB of Elastic Block Storage

•2TB of S3 Storage

•6.5 TB of Data Out / mo

•2TB of Data In / mo

•150M+ Pageviews and just one sysadmin!


BenefitsData Center (per

month)

Servers: $6KCabinet (x3): $15KBandwidth: $2.5KSupport: N/A

Total: $23.5K

EC2 (per month)

Servers: $13KStorage: $1.5KBandwidth: $1.1KSupport: $1.2K

Total: $16.8K

29% Cheaper!Estimated Pricing

Based on public Amazon pricing, reddit open source code, and public configuration

information


Benefits

•Don’t have to procure servers anymore


Benefits


•No racking or imaging servers anymore


Benefits



•Time to market is faster


Benefits




•Multiple physical locations with AZs


Benefits•Don’t have to procure servers

anymore




•Get “free” upgrades


Benefits•Don’t have to procure servers anymore




•Get “free” upgrades

•Elasticity!


Pain Points


Pain Points

Higher Latency

Workaround: Fewer network calls, ask for more data at a time.


Pain Points

EBS sometimes slows down a bit

Workaround: Use caching and replication with read slaves to avoid relying on a single disk.


Pain Points

Instances go away sometimes

Workaround: Avoid single points of failure and make sure your servers have automated configuration.


Pain Points

Fixing these issues made our app more reliable and highly available. We are better off than when we started.


Best Practices

•Keep data in multiple Availability Zones


Best Practices


•EBS for all persistent data


Best Practices



•Snapshots


Best Practices



•Snapshots

•No secret keys on the instance


Best Practices•Keep data in multiple Availability

Zones


•Snapshots

•No secret keys on the instance

•Different functions in different Security Groups


Best Practices

•A full stack in each zone


Best Practices


•All data stored as key-value pairs


Best Practices


•All data stored as key-value pairs

•More use of queues


Conclusion

•AWS saves us a lot of money


Conclusion


•AWS gives us a lot of flexibility


Conclusion



•Moving to AWS has forced us to build better applications and follow better IT practices.


Conclusion



•Moving to AWS has forced us to build better applications and follow better IT practices.

•http://code.reddit.com


Revolution: CloudRevolution: Cloud

To learn more, visit

http://www.revolutioncloud.com