The Amazon Web Services Cloud platform offers many unique advantages that can improve and expedite application development that traditional solutions cannot offer. Cloud computing eliminates the need for hardware procurement and makes resources available to anyone with fewer financial resources. What once may have taken months to prepare can now be ready in weeks, days, or even hours. A huge advantage to developing in the Cloud is speed. You no longer have to worry about the infrastructure, storage, or computing capacity needed to build and deploy applications. Development teams can focus on what they do best – creating applications.
Server and networking infrastructure
Developing a new application platform from start to finish can be a lengthy process fraught with numerous hurdles from an operations and infrastructure perspective that cause unanticipated delays of all types. Issues such as budget restrictions, hardware procurement, datacenter capacity and network connectivity are some of the usual suspects when it comes to delays in the development process. Developers cannot develop a platform without the requisite server and networking hardware in place, and deployment of those resources traditionally can require a significant investment of money, time and people.
Items that may need to be taken into consideration for preparing an environment include:
- Servers
- Networking hardware (e.g. switches and load balancers)
- Datacenter cabinets
- Power Distribution Units (PDU)
- Power circuits
- Cabling (e.g. power and network)
Delays related to any item on the above list can easily set back timeframes anywhere from a day to a few weeks. A short list of problems that can throw a wrench into plans include:
- Potentially having to negotiate new agreements to lease additional datacenter space
- Hardware vendor inventory shortages (servers, switches, memory, disks, etc.)
- Bad network-cross connects, ports and transceivers
- Lack of hosting provider/datacenter cabinet space
- Over provisioned power capacity requiring additional circuits and/or PDU’s
- Defective hardware requiring RMA processing
- Long wait times for installation of hardware by remote-hands
In a perfect world, the ideal development and staging environments will exactly mirror production, providing zero variability across the various stacks, with the exception of perhaps endpoint connectivity. Maintenance of multiple environments can be very time consuming. Performing development and ing in the AWS Cloud can help to completely eliminate many of the above headaches.
AWS handles all hardware provisioning, allowing you to select the hardware you need when you want it and pay by the hour as you go. Eliminating up-front costs allows for ing on or near the exact same type of hardware as in production and with the desired capacity. No need to worry about datacenter cabinet capacity and power. No need to have a single server running multiple functions (e.g. database and caching) because there simply isn’t enough hardware to go around. For applications that are anticipated to handle significant amounts of processing, this can be extremely advantageous for ing at scale. This is a key area where compromises are usually made in regards to hardware platforms and capacity. It’s commonplace to have older hardware re-used for development purposes because that’s simply the only hardware available, or to have multiple stacks being developed on a single platform because of a lack of resources, whether from a budget or hardware perspective. In a nutshell, provisioning hardware can be expensive and time consuming.
Utilizing a Cloud provider such as AWS eliminates the above headaches and allows for quickly deploying an infrastructure at scale with the hardware resources you want, when you want them. There are no up-front hardware costs for servers or networking equipment, and you can ‘turn off’ the instances if and when they are not being used for additional savings. Along with the elimination of up-front hardware costs is the adjustment of changing from capital expenses to operating expenses. Viewing hardware and resources from this perspective allows greater insight into expenses on a month-to-month basis, which can increase accountability and help to minimize and control spending. Beyond the issues of hardware and financing, there are other numerous benefits.
Ensuring software uniformity across stacks
This can be achieved by creating custom AMI’s (Amazon Machine Images) allowing for the same OS and software packages to be included on deployed instances. Alternatively, User Data scripts which execute commands (e.g. software installation and configuration) can also be used for this purpose when provisioning instances. Being able to deploy multiple instances in minutes with just a few mouse clicks is now possible. Need to load and find out if your platform can handle 50,000 transactions per second? Simply deploy additional instances that have been created using an AMI built from an existing instance and add them to a load balancer configuration. AWS also features the AWS Marketplace, which helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services they need to build products and run their businesses. Customers can select software from well-known vendors already packaged into AMI’s that are ready to use upon instance launch.
Data consistency
Trying to duplicate a database store usually involves dumping a database and then re-inserting that data into another server, which can be very time consuming. First you have to dump the data, and then it has to be imported to the destination. A much faster method that can be utilized on AWS is to:
- Snapshot the datastore volume
- Create an EBS volume from the snapshot in the desired availability zone
- Attach the EBS volume to another instance
- Mount the volume and then start the database engine.
*Note that snapshots are region specific and will need to be copied if they are to be used in a region that differs from where they were originally created.
If utilizing the AWS RDS (Relational Database Service), the process is even simpler. All that’s needed is to create a snapshot of the RDS instance and deploy another instance from the snapshot. Again, if deploying in a different region, the snapshot will need to be copied between regions.
Infrastructure consistency
Being that AWS is API driven, it allows for the easy deployment of infrastructure as code utilizing the CloudFormation service. It utilizes JSON formatted templates that allow for the provisioning of various resources such as S3 buckets, EC2 instances, auto scale groups, security groups, load balancers and EBS volumes. VPC’s (Virtual Private Cloud) can also be created using this same service, allowing for duplication of network environments between development, staging and production. Utilizing CloudFormation to deploy AWS infrastructure can greatly expedite the process of security validation. Once an environment has passed ing, the same CFT’s (CloudFormation Templates) can be used to deploy an exact copy of your stack in another VPC or region. Properly investing the time during the development and phases to refine CloudFormation code can reduce deployment of additional environments to a few clicks of a mouse button – try accomplishing that with a physical datacenter.
Higher-level services
For those wishing to utilize higher-level services to further simplify the deployment of environments, AWS offers the Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks services. Both are designed to reduce the complexity of deploying and managing the hardware and network layers on which applications run. Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use and highly simplified application management service for building web apps and web services with popular application containers such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and .NET. Customers upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically does the rest. OpsWorks features an integrated management experience for the entire application lifecycle including resource provisioning (e.g. instances, databases, load balancers), configuration management (Chef), application deployment, monitoring, and access control. It will work with applications of any level of complexity and is independent of any particular architectural pattern. Compared to Elastic Beanstalk, it also provides more control over the various layers comprising application stacks such as:
- Application Layers: Ruby on Rails, PHP, Node.js, Java, and Nginx
- Data Layers: MySQL and Memcached
- Utility Layers: Ganglia and HAProxy
Summary
The examples above highlight some of the notable features and advantages AWS offers that can be utilized to expedite and assist application development. Public Cloud computing is changing the way organizations build, deploy and manage solutions. Notably, operating expenses now replace capital expenses, costs are lowered due to no longer having to guess capacity, and resources are made available on-demand. All of this adds up to reduced costs and shorter development times, which enables products and services to reach end-users much faster.
-Ryan Manikowski, Cloud Engineer
