Conversing in the Cloud

Ryan Kupfer, Scott Wetter, Bryan Welfel, Shekhar Pradhan

Outline

MixPool defined The hurdles A prime example of an application

utilizing cloud technology The technologies The architecture of the app and its

deployment on Amazon Web Services

MixPool Defined

The MixPool app consists of two main components: Connect and Decide.

Groups of “friends” are formed in the Connect component.

Groups of “friends” can decide what to do and where to go in the Decide component.

Application Hurdles

Supporting asynchronous chatAWS instances are optimized for their

specific tasksProcessing applications (bots) exist in the

cloud

User count fluctuatesScale up and scale down quickly

System Architecture

Technologies

Amazon Web Services, the “Powered by Amazon Web Services” logo, [and name any other AWS Marks used in such materials] are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.

Lightweight, high-performance web server and reverse proxy server

Load balancing Serves static content:

ImagesVideoCSSJavascriptFlash (swf)

Most common web server Very stable Great for serving dynamic content Used for CakePHP application

CakePHP

CakePHP is an open source web application framework for producing web applications. It is written in PHP, modeled after the concepts of Ruby on Rails.

MySQL

Open source Great community Good performance Scalable if necessary

ReplicationClustering

Bots

Connect to chat servers and process conversations

We chose Java for our bot developmentOne of the most popular OOP languagesEasy to find programmersMany libraries available to complete our

tasks quickly

NLP Suggestion Bot Chat room messages are analyzed in real time

to identify the needs of users (e.g., “casual place”) and occurrences of restaurant names, cuisines and dishes.

Sentiments expressed in the message regarding these are identified.

Based on these sentiments and user needs, scores are assigned to restaurants, cuisines, and dishes.

A restaurant is suggested based on this score and other data stored in our database.

History Bot Chat rooms are asynchronous

Thus, users may join at different times.A user that joins later needs to be provided

earlier chat messages and related restaurant suggestions.

Chat rooms can be intermittently active/inactiveAn inactive room can become activated.Earlier chat room messages and related

restaurant messages need to be provided to all room users.

InstanceMonitor

• Starts with each bot EC2 instance• Allows us to control the individual bot

applications remotely– XML-RPC API• Statistics that BRICS uses to figure out the best-

fit instance– CPU load– Memory used– Open socket connections

BRICS (Bot Request and Instance Creation System) Central hub for bot requests Load balancing bots between the

instances Requests received from the IRC servers

whenever a room is created and joined Request is processed and given to the

best-fit instance InstanceMonitor on the best-fit instance

handles the task

IRC

Internet Relay Chat Created in 1988 Very simple, well established TCP/IP

based asynchronous chat system Used for our real-time chat system Flash is used on our website to connect

to the IRC servers and interact with the web application

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Pay as you go cloud computing– Simple pricing (hours used, data transferred)

• Use existing infrastructure to rapidly build complicated systems– Run almost anything (you choose the OS,

programming language, etc.)• Scalable

– Add compute capacity and storage immediately• Good for planning

– Ability to test different infrastructure configurations to find optimal setup

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)• Web service that provides resizable

compute capacity in the cloud• Select either a pre-configured instance

template or create one• Configure security/network access• Choose hardware configuration:

– Standard Instances– High-Memory Instances– High-CPU Instances

EC2 Pros

• Start and stop server instances within minutes• Pay only for the time you have your instance up

and for data transfer to and from your instance. • Acts just like a regular remote server

– Connect to it and start using it immediately – Full root access

• Convenient and easy to use web UI for managing instances

• Firewall settings for groups of instances

EC2 Cons Few locations to choose from No control over the specific hardware in use Instance crash/termination: all the data

stored on it is gone

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Simple to deploy Handles database management tasks Easy to port an existing MySql database Scalable, reliable, secure Designed to integrate with other AWS

System Architecture

System Architecture

System Architecture

System Architecture

Questions?