Scaling Applications for Large Promotions and Events

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Blair Layton, Business Development Manager, APAC

May, 2016

Scaling Applications for Large

Promotions and Events

What is a

Large Scale Event?

What is a Large Scale Event

An event where you need more capacity than normally

allocated for a period of time

Typically from minutes to days, but could be a couple of

weeks

Often associated with a sudden surge of users

Hard to architect and provision for at a reasonable cost

Consumers get angry when it all goes wrong!

What is a Large Scale Event?

For you, it could be as simple as needing twice as much

capacity for a short promotion

Everyone’s Large Scale Event is different, but the

underlying concepts are the same

What Problems do you Face?

Unknown infrastructure requirements

• Cost?

Short duration of the event

• Massive investment in infrastructure that is otherwise idle or underutilized

• Often tight deadlines to get the system live

Legacy system integration

Understanding system bahaviour, required metrics

Getting the right architecture

Finding the right talent

You Don’t Want This!

One question is

constant!

How do we scale,

especially the

database?

Let’s Look at Some

Customer Examples

Gumi Asia - Singaporean

Gaming Company

Sizing for Peak Loads

Promotions cause huge spikes in user activity

Auto-scaling works for the web and middle tier

RDS instances have to be sized for peak loads

Adopted our recommendations in a staged approach

Amazon

Route 53

CloudFront

Availability Zone #1

Amazon S3

Availability Zone #2

Amazon EC2Amazon EC2

Auto Scaling

Geo Routing

US East

Amazon

CloudWatch

RDS DB Instance

Active (Multi-AZ)RDS DB Instance

Standby (Multi-AZ)

User

Amazon

Route 53

CloudFront

Availability Zone #1

Amazon S3

Availability Zone #2

Amazon EC2Amazon EC2

Auto Scaling

Geo Routing

US East

User

Amazon

CloudWatch

RDS DB Instance

Active (Multi-AZ)RDS DB Instance

Standby (Multi-AZ)

RDS DB

instance read

replica

Amazon

Route 53

CloudFront

Availability Zone #1

Amazon S3

DynamoDB

Availability Zone #2

Amazon EC2Amazon EC2

Auto Scaling

Geo Routing

US East

User

Amazon

CloudWatch

RDS DB Instance

Active (Multi-AZ)RDS DB Instance

Standby (Multi-AZ)

RDS DB

instance read

replica

Amazon

Route 53

CloudFront

Availability Zone #1

Amazon S3

DynamoDB

Availability Zone #2

Amazon EC2ElastiCache

Memcached

Amazon EC2

Auto Scaling

Geo Routing

US East

User

Amazon

CloudWatch

RDS DB Instance

Active (Multi-AZ)RDS DB Instance

Standby (Multi-AZ)

RDS DB

instance read

replica

Amazon

Route 53

CloudFront

Availability Zone #1

Amazon S3

DynamoDB

Availability Zone #2

Amazon EC2

ElastiCache

(Redis Master)

ElastiCache

Memcached

Amazon EC2

Redis Slave

Auto Scaling

Geo Routing

US East

User

Amazon

CloudWatch

RDS DB Instance

Active (Multi-AZ)RDS DB Instance

Standby (Multi-AZ)

RDS DB

instance read

replica

Amazon Redshift

Lessons Learned

Listen to AWS Business Development and Solution

Architects ;)

Gaming promotions much easier to handle

Unpredicted loads also easier to handle

Senior operations person moving to a new game

Customers get a much better gaming experience!

Singaporean Telco

Customer Success Stories

Telecommunications Company

iPhone 5s/5c, 6/6+ and Samsung Note III launch

Needed a system to handle a huge number of concurrent

requests

Failed previously at the iPhone5 launch

Management directive to succeed at all costs!

Telco

Availability Zone

Elastic Load

Balancer

Web

Instance

Web

Instance

Web

Instance

Web

Instance

Amazon

Route 53User

Amazon S3

Amazon

Cloudfront

Amazon

DynamoDB

ElastiCache

Amazon

CloudWatch

ElastiCache

Great Success!

Tested with 150,000 concurrent users

All phones gone within 2 minutes

No phones misallocated or unallocated

Management said the system was too fast!

Actual launch went smoothly

Lessons

AWS can provide infrastructure for applications to scale to

very high concurrent users

Managed services allow for quick deployment and changes

to infrastructure

Impossible for the customer to execute internally

Massive cost savings, even with huge over provisioning

“With our systems on AWS, we

can scale our resources more

than 130-fold in 30 minutes,

enabling us to support more

than 2,500 orders per second”

KT Chiu

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

TixCraft