Just Do It!Building and running high volume applications in the

cloud

Charles TeagueCEO, FitNow, Inc.

What is Lose It?Free mobile application,

website Calorie tracking Peer support using social networking

Lose It! by the numbers 7+ million downloads 1m+ Loseit.com users 15,000 requests per minute, 24x7

load 4 people working full time at Lose It!

Helped users lose more than 5.5 million pounds since 2009

What does that have to do with the cloud?!Lose It! started as a local only mobile application

Need for additional capabilities drove need for web serviceClient -> web sync supportSocial featuresWeb version of Lose It!

Unpredictable initial demand and usage growth made it difficult to estimate scale

Millions of users made high volume likely

As a startup, our team is small

Our challenge was to build and run a service that supports millions of users with very limited resources…

How can we do this?

LEVERAGEUse the cloud and platform as a service to

make development, deployment, and operation of our service faster and easier.*

Leverage the cloudLow startup cost

Ability to scale in response to anticipated demand

Efficiently onboard new services and capabilities

Choose deep, best of breed services that represent significantly more technology and expertise than we’d be able to create ourselves.

Use of cloud eliminates need for us to focus on deployment, management, and administration of compute, disk, and other lower level infrastructure

Leverage Platform as a ServiceLow operational overhead

Simplified deployment

No dedicated operations engineer

Spin up and down development, test, and preproduction environments quickly and easily

PAAS eliminates the need for us to focus on deployment, management, and administration of our application container, data container, and other higher level infrastructure

The result?

We spend most of our calories worrying about delivering the most compelling and effective consumer experience

Our time, effort, and opportunity isn’t spent on simply running the infrastructure required to support our usersBut we’re still up 3 ninesAn average request to our server is fulfilled in under 250ms

Our laser focus translates into a superior customer experience for our users

LASER FOCUS

What technology?Java / Tomcat

Compiler checkedHigh performanceNative GWT Support

MySQLRelationalProvenUse both InnoDB / MyISAM

Web – Google Web ToolkitCompiler checkedEncodes best practices from GoogleMobile – native and GWT/HTML hybrid client

What cloud services?Application Development

Development and staging environments

Iterative deployment services

Build services and continuous deployment (future)

Source code management

Issue Tracking

What cloud services?Application Runtime

Scalable Java application stack

HTTP routing and load-balancing

Clustered database services

Server hardware and virtualization

Network management

Data storage devices

Email services

What cloud services?Application Monitoring / Operations

Application performance monitoring

Uptime tracking and alerting

Application and database recovery

Umbrella support - someone to call!

Architecture

The Myth of the Cloud / Black Box

Infrastructure and platform as a service is a *great* abstraction

Your application has its own characteristics

The infrastructure itself has particular characteristics

There is no single cloud configuration that represents a well tuned, reliable, and high performance solution for every profile of application

Real World EC2Persistent disk I/O (EBS) performance not

great Also can be more variable than you’d expect Ripples into data performance, esp. for disk intensive work like

transactional writes (InnoDB)

Hardware itself is not configurable Can’t add a battery backed up disk write cache for performance

Pay attention to EC2 instance sizes Remember that a small instance is really a very slow computer And depending upon instance sizes, you will be sharing physical

resources with other applications.

Real world adviceFor MySQL, use big instances with huge RAM.

Configure big caches to protect you from slow I/O

Protect your database with application caches (even simple simple Hashmaps)

Design application / data storage to support sharding

Make sure app server tier is cluster safe

Use queuing to decouple work from main application

More ChallengesThe cloud and PAAS does provide

incredible leverage, but some things are actually a pain in this environment.

Scheduled jobs

Logging /Server diagnostics / error reporting

Full text search implementations

Server coordination

Portability

File Storage

Wrap upThe cloud gives small teams unprecedented

leverage to build and deploy applications

But it’s no silver bullet

Application architecture may be even more important to achieving scale on the cloud

Beware the myth of the cloud/blackbox

Get real about the platform that you’re deploying

Leverage platform as a service to gain leverage