Architectural Patterns for the Cloud

Architectural Patterns for the Cloud
Maarten Balliauw
@maartenballiauw

APRIL 17, 2012 | SLIDE 2

Who am I?
 Maarten Balliauw
 Antwerp, Belgium
 www.realdolmen.com
 Focus on web
 ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, SignalR, ...
 MVP Windows Azure & ASPInsider
 http://blog.maartenballiauw.be
 @maartenballiauw
 Author: Pro NuGet - http://amzn.to/pronuget

Agenda
 Quick recap: Windows Azure
 What’s different in the cloud?
 Rethinking apps
 Conclusion


Quick recap
Windows Azure

Windows Azure is a cloud platform
 On-demand
 Self-service
 Pay per use
 Highly automated


Windows Azure Components

Compute Storage SQL Azure Service Bus Connect

BI Marketplace CDN Caching ACS

Application Services Storage Services Foundation Services


What’s different
in the cloud?

Differences with your infrastructure
 Uniform
 Automated
 Designed for failure
 Designed for scale
 It’s not in your datacenter


Uniform
 Every machine +/- the same
 No specialized hardware
 No specialized OS*


Demo
Customizing the Windows Azure virtual machine

Automated
 Makes decisions on provisioning &
updating
 Monitors health
 The platform knows what’s best
 Not necessarily for your app…


Designed for failure

UD 1

UD 2


Designed for scale
 Scale out
 Stateless


It’s not in your datacenter
 Integration
 Authentication


Rethinking apps
What do I have to think about?

Scenario: Newspaper website
 National & International
 Sudden spikes in usage
 Dynamic content
 Static content


Current architecture
 Will work on the cloud!
 Will fail on the cloud!


Design for failure

Assume everything will fail
 Automated service maintenance
 Compute node crash
 Storage throttling
 SQL Azure throttling
 Connectivity
 Your code

Retry everything
SQL Azure Error 40501
The service is currently busy. Retry the
request after 10 seconds.

Retry against anything that might be external
SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus, …

http://windowsazurecat.com/2011/02/transient-fault-
handling-framework/

The entire datacenter fails!
 Run in 2+ datacenters
 Keep data synchronized
 All data
 or limit scope


Refactoring the architecture


Windows Azure Data Centers

100ms

50ms


Windows Azure Traffic Manager


Windows Azure Traffic Manager
 Strategies
 Round-robin
 Fail-over
 Performance (geo)
 Solves datacenter outage


Are we there yet?


Solutions to a SPOF being down
 Set a monitoring endpoint for TM
 Take the entire datacenter out of the loop

 Take the SPOF out of the story
 Degrade gracefully


Refactoring our architecture


Design for scale
*and failure

Belgians are not used to snow

What will happen to our
architecture?


Here’s what will happen…


Solution: scale out!
 Add more VM’s!
 Autoscaling (WASABi)
 Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block
 Enterprise Library
 http://entlib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=WASABiBet
aReleaseNotes&referringTitle=EntLib5Azure


Solution: scale out!
 Add more VM’s!
 Autoscaling (as-a-Service)
 www.opstera.com


Here’s what will happen…


SQL Azure
 Monitored by the platform
 The platform does not like high DB traffic
 Throttling & retries


Caching
 Most of our users are doing reads
 Cache content near where it’s needed

 Windows Azure Caching
 Blob Storage


Caching
 How do you populate it?
 When do you populate it?
 When do you invalidate it?


Work asynchrounously
 Read from cache
 Present? Use cache
 Not present? Ask to cache it & read from
DB


A typical web request…
 1 request is dynamic
 493 requests are static*

 Get that static content out of your servers!
 Cache content near where it’s needed


Windows Azure CDN


Conclusion

Key takeaways
 Cloud is different
 Design for failure
 Design for scale
 Work asynchronously
 Cache close to where it’s needed
 Also think price vs. Allowed outage

One more… Learn from others!
 Amazon - http://slidesha.re/AlaHIG
 Trello - http://bit.ly/xO5G9e
 YouPorn - http://bit.ly/yUSanQ
 StackOverflow - http://bit.ly/xkLvH9
 InstaGram - http://bit.ly/xbWuzx
 … (highscalability.com)

http://blog.maartenballiauw.be
@maartenballiauw

http://amzn.to/pronuget
or Install-Package ProNuGet

THANK YOU!

Architectural Patterns for the Cloud

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