1. The Columbus Dispatch on Amazon

2. The Presenters David Landreman Web Services IT Manager Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com Twitter: @GraphIt2000 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman Andrew Roth Senior Internet Development Engineer Email: aroth@dispatch.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew

3. Newspapers, weekly periodicals, TV stations, and radio stations 23 unique websites hosted on Amazon in a unified content management system (OpenCMS) Millions of pageviews daily

4. Cloud Migration Project to upgrade content management system to new version Original plan was to migrate hardware from co- lo data center physical to VMWare virtual at the same data center 2 months prior to completion the decision was made to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

5. Amazon Selection Factors Team familiarity with AWS Ease of beginning an engagement o No contract Cost o Limited payment options Large client base (Netflix, Instagram, …) Large selection of services beyond virtual computing resources

7. Cloud Computing Paradigms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Virtualized computing hardware Platform as a Service (PaaS) Prepackaged / managed runtime application platform. Reduced complexity when compared to IaaS Software as a Service (SaaS) Full service software solution running in the cloud. * Amazon has offerings in all these areas *

8. The Cloud Model

9. Amazon Offerings Infrastructure as a Service EC2, Elastic Load Balancers Platform as a Service Elastic BeanStalk, Elastic Map Reduce, CloudFormation, Relational Database Service, SimpleDB, DynamoDB Software as a Service Flexible Payments Service, Mechanical Turk

10. Scalability on Amazon RDS and EC2 allows for easy scaling up / down of server sizes Elastic Beanstalk compatible applications can make use of autoscaling of EC2 instances (EC2 as a PaaS) Spot Instances for non time sensitive tasks

11. Reliability on Amazon Regions o Consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. Currently there are 8 Regions. Availability Zones o Distinct locations engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. Protect application against failures in a single location by launching instances in different Regions and Availability Zones.

12. Security on Amazon Can it be secure? Security Groups IAM - User / Role Management Can it be PCI compliant? PCI DSS Level 1 for most services (RDS, S3, …) Can it be HIPAA compliant? Security Groups In flight / at rest encryption Case Study: MedCommons patient records Government Compliance GovCloud - Requires pre-approval from AWS to start infrastructure in this cloud. Only United States Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) vs Classic Cloud

13. How Dispatch Uses Amazon All 23 public facing sites are hosted entirely in Amazon Limited communication back to internal infrastructure via Web Services Multiple environments (Prod, QA, Development) o Ease of keeping QA as a mirror of production

15. CloudWatch Default metrics for all EC2 Instances e.g. CPU, memory, disk IO 1 minute measurement interval Tracking custom metrics OpenCMS Publish Times, Java Heap Usage, Database Connections Alert Thresholds Text message, email, JSON posts

16. SimpleDB - NoSQL Used for tracking user content access for metered site access 60 million+ records and growing Managed NoSQL Solution NoSQL = Non-relational data store Extremely simple and flexible data model (e.g. key-value store) ClcGrU8Eapig2y5eD7r2Ag==201202www.dispatch.com/content/index.html Unique User ID Year/Month of Access Site Content Accessed

17. SimpleDB – NoSQL (cont.) High availability and scalability Amazon manages multiple geographically distrubuted replicas of your data SimpleDB is eventually consistent Weaknesses Complex pricing structure / hard to estimate No good mechanism for backups Decision to use SimpleDB came before launch of DynamoDB

18. Relational Database Service (RDS) Hosts all web application data Exception is user access data in SimpleDB Managed Relational Database MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL We use MySQL Change to traditional database administration No access to server console No access to a true SA account

19. Relational Database Service (cont.) Multi Availability Zone deployment Failover is not instantaneous (1 - 2 minutes) Easy server upgrades with maintenance windows Support for read replica databases Restore snapshots automatically generated Up to past 10 days

20. Simple Queue Service (SQS) Message passing service to facilitate indirect communication Similar to Java Message Service (JMS) Why use SQS? We run in Amazon's classic cloud configuration IP Addresses randomly assigned Ideal architecture on AWS reduces direct communication between boxes Used for application servers communicating with video transcoding server Starting new transcoding jobs Getting transcoding progress updates Scalability

21. ElastiCache Managed Memcached Service Web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. Integration of ElastiCache metrics with CloudWatch Hit rates, Eviction Rates etc. Reduces hits to our database servers, faster page loads and increases ability to handle high traffic volumes

22. Simple Email Service (SES) Managed service for bulk email sending CloudWatch Integration Monitor deliveries, bounces etc. from within AWS console Multiple endpoints SMTP Web Service Calls

23. Simple Storage Service (S3) First Amazon Web Service Offering File storage in the cloud Can serve static websites directly from S3 We use for various processes: Backing up a SQL dump of our production database Temporary storage of video content during transcoding process Data storage for workflows involving importing content from other areas of the business into their websites.

24. June 29th Weekend Wind Storm US East Region (1 of 4 zones offline) Both primary and backup power lost Network connectivity issues between availability zones RDS fail-over to a bad zone Leap Second Bug

25. Wind Storm - Lessons Learned Single point of failure on ElastiCache All nodes in a cluster occupy a single AWS Zone Database failover Up to a minute of no connectivity Limited communication from Amazon No time estimates for service restoration

26. Leap Second – Lessons Learned Not an Amazon specific issue Amazon support options Open a ticket Phone Calls Online Chat Forums (Only free option) Amazon able to diagnose issue quickly 23:59:60 Saturday, June 30, 2012 UTC

27. What is Next? Moving to Cloud Search Reduce Total Cost of Ownership Moving from Limelight to CloudFront CDN Significant cost savings

28. Questions? David Landreman Web Services IT Manager Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com Twitter: @GraphIt2000 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman Andrew Roth Senior Internet Development Engineer Email: aroth@dispatch.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew