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 chat AWS instances are optimized for their specific tasks Processing applications (bots) exist in the cloud  User count fluctuates Scale 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: Images Video CSS Javascript Flash (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 Replication Clustering

Bots  Connect to chat servers and process conversations  We chose Java for our bot development One of the most popular OOP languages Easy to find programmers Many 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/inactive An 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

Questions ?