Resilience and Reliability on AWS

Preface

Thank you (again) for picking up one of our books! If you have read Programming Amazon EC2, you probably have some expectations about this book.

The idea behind this book came from Mike Loukides, one of our editors. He was fascinated with the idea of resilience and reliability in engineering. At the same time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had been growing and growing.

As is the case for other systems, AWS does not go without service interruptions. The underlying architecture and available services are designed to help you deal with this. But as outages have shown, this is difficult, especially when you are powering the majority of the popular web services.

So how do we help people prepare? We already have a good book on the basics of engineering on AWS. But it deals with relatively simple applications, solely comprised of AWS’s infrastructural components. What we wanted to show is how to build service components yourself and make them resilient and reliable.

The heart of this book is a collection of services we run in our infrastructures. We’ll show things like Postgres and Redis, but also elasticsearch and MongoDB. But before we talk about these, we will introduce AWS and our approach to Resilience and Reliability.

We want to help you weather the next (AWS) outage!

Audience

If Amazon Web Services is new to you, we encourage you to pick up a copy of Programming Amazon EC2. Familiarize yourself with the many services AWS offers. It certainly helps to have worked (or played) with many of them.

Even though many of our components are nothing more than a collection of scripts (bash, Python, Ruby, PHP) don’t be fooled. The lack of a development environment does not make it easier to engineer your way out of many problems.

Therefore, we feel this book is probably well-suited for software engineers. We use this term inclusively—not every programmer is a software engineer, and many system administrators are software engineers. But you at least need some experience building complex systems. It helps to have seen more than one programming language. And it certainly helps to have been responsible for operations.

Conventions Used in This Book

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Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code examples, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Resilience and Reliability on AWS (O’Reilly). Copyright 2013 9apps B.V., 978-1-449-33919-7.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

There are many people we would like to thank for making this book into what it is now. But first of all, it would never have been possible without our parents, Franny Geurtsen, Jos Geurtsen, Aurora Gómez, Hans van Vliet, Marry van Vliet, and Ricardo Paganelli.

The work in this book is not ours alone. Our list will probably not be complete, and we apologize in advance if we forgot you, but we could not have written this book without the people from Publitas (Ali, Khalil, Guillermo, Dieudon, Dax, Felix), Qelp (Justin, Pascal, Martijn, Bas, Jasper), Olery (Wilco, Wijnand, Kim, Peter), Buzzer (Pim), Fashiolista (Thierry, Tomasso, Mike, Joost), Usabilla (Marc, Gijs, Paul), inSided (Wouter, Jochem, Maik), Poikos (Elleanor, David), Directness (Roy, Alessio, Adam), Marvia (Jons, Arnoud, Edwin, Tom), and Videodock (Bauke, Nick).

Of course, you need a fresh pair of eyes going over every detail and meticulously trying out examples to find errors. Our technical reviewers, Dave Ward and Mitch Garnaat, did just that.

And finally, there is the wonderful and extremely professional team at O’Reilly. Without Mike, Meghan, and all the others there wouldn’t even have been a book. Thank you!