AWS re:Invent 2016

Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing and provides you with complete control of your computing resources. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. In this session, we will take you on a journey, starting with the basics of key management and security groups and ending with an explanation of Auto Scaling and how you can use it to match capacity and costs to demand using dynamic policies. We will also discuss tools and best practices that will help you build failure resilient applications that take advantage of the scale and robustness of AWS regions

Over the last year, Yelp has transitioned its scalable and reliable parallel task execution system, Seagull, from On-Demand and Reserved Instances entirely to Spot Fleet. Seagull runs over 28 million tests per day, launches more than 2.5 million Docker containers per day, and uses over 10,000 vCPUs in Spot Fleet at peak capacity. To deal with rising infrastructure costs for Seagull, we have extended our in-house Auto Scaling Engine called FleetMiser to scale the Spot Fleet in response to demand. FleetMiser has reduced Seagull’s cluster costs by 60% in the past year and saved Yelp thousands of dollars every month.

Amazon Lightsail is the latest addition to the AWS family of compute services and the fastest way to get your next cloud server up and running. For a low price that starts at $5/month, Lightsail offers a bundle of resources and services that let you jumpstart your cloud project in a few clicks. The new, intuitive Lightsail console makes it simple to manage your virtual resources, letting you focus on code, not system administration. Come to this session and learn how Lightsail can get you started on AWS quickly and efficiently.

High performance computing in the cloud is enabling high scale compute- and graphics-intensive workloads across industries, ranging from aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing to life sciences, financial services, and energy. AWS provides application developers and end users with unprecedented computational power for massively parallel applications, in areas such as large-scale fluid and materials simulations, 3D content rendering, financial computing, and deep learning. This session provides an overview of HPC capabilities on AWS, describes the newest generations of accelerated computing instances (including P2), as well as highlighting customer and partner use-cases across industries.

AWS is an elastic, secure, flexible, and developer-centric ecosystem that serves as an ideal platform for Docker deployments. AWS offers the scalable infrastructure, APIs, and SDKs that integrate tightly into a development lifecycle and accentuate the benefits of the lightweight and portable containers that Docker offers to its users.

Serverless architectures let you build and deploy applications and services with infrastructure resources that require zero administration. In the past, you had to provision and scale servers to run your application code, install and operate distributed databases, and build and run custom software to handle API requests. Now, AWS provides a stack of scalable, fully-managed services that eliminates these operational complexities.

A worldwide dynamic website infrastructure at the cost and simplicity of a static deployment was once an unachievable dream. That’s no longer the case with the tools and services that AWS offers like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. During this session we will discuss a DevOps approach to managing your code repositories, code quality, continuous integration and deployments. We discuss some static website generators such as mkdocs, Jekyll, and middleman for building knowledge bases, blogs and websites in a serverless architecture.

At Librato, a Solarwinds company, we run hundreds of Cassandra instances across multiple rings and use it as our primary data store. In the past year, we embarked on a process to upgrade our fleet of Cassandra Amazon EC2 instances from instance store to instances using Amazon EBS and attached elastic network interfaces (ENIs). We find running Cassandra on EBS gives us the flexibility to choose the best instances for the best performance of our workload while saving us significant costs on infrastructure. In this session, we discuss how Librato operates Cassandra on EBS. Topics include how we chose the right instance for our workload, use detached EBS volumes and ENI mobility to reduce MTTR, use mixed EBS storage types for the best cost/performance tradeoff, debug performance issues, and continuously monitor Cassandra to get the most from AWS. We also look at performance tradeoffs made in the implementation of storage engines of large data systems like Cassandra.

Amazon EC2 provides a broad selection of instance types to accommodate a diverse mix of workloads. In this session, we provide an overview of the Amazon EC2 instance platform, key platform features, and the concept of instance generations. We dive into the current generation design choices of the different instance families, including the General Purpose, Compute Optimized, Storage Optimized, Memory Optimized, and GPU instance families. We also detail best practices and share performance tips for getting the most out of your Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon EC2 Spot instances provide acceleration, scale, and deep cost savings to run time-critical, hyper-scale workloads for rapid data analysis. In this session, AOL and Metamarkets will present lessons learned and best practices from scaling their big data workloads using popular platforms like Presto, Spark and Druid.