AWS case study: real estate portal
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The document discusses the high-level architecture of Spitogatos.gr's use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the lessons learned during their implementation. It highlights the platform's goals to simplify property searches in Greece and presents various AWS services utilized for scalability and efficient operations. The author shares insights on challenges faced, including session management and the iterative process of continuous improvement in their cloud infrastructure.
AWS case study: real estate portal
- 1. Spitogatos.gr & Amazon Web Services High level architecture & lessons learned AWSUG GR meetup #1 16 Feb 2012 Andreas Chatzakis co-founder / IT Director @ Spitogatos.gr
- 2. By David Fletcher - www.cloudtweaks.com
- 3. #about_us
- 4. Helping you find a property Finding a property in Greece is complex, lacks transparency. We make life easier for househunters via: Powerful search functionality Web & Mobile Location & Criteria Quality content Listings (we love photos) Articles mySpitogatos Email alerts Save your search Favorite listings & notes Contact the realtors 4
- 5. Realtors love us too! Professionals need help in those turbulent times. We add value in multiple ways: Cost effective promotion & high quality leads Targeted channel (very) Leads already filtered (we ve seen the fotos!) Technology services for realtors Turnkey web site solution Listing synchronization web service B2B via Spitogatos Network (SpiN) business network / collaboration tool for realtors Channel for foreign buyers via the English version 5
- 6. Not just “αγγελίες” Our vision is to become a one-stop-shop for all things house related 6
- 7. #why_aws
- 8. The need for change Infrastructure change dictated by our business needs Ongoing traffic increase A nice headache Growing Data S3 to the rescue Major new functionality Higher CPU & RAM requirements Uneven traffic pattern Why should I pay for this server during the night? ...and constraints Let's not spend our time managing systems: AMIs? Yes thank you! Zero management services like ELB? √ Like 8
- 10. Your typical multi-tier web architecture Storage Layer 10
- 11. Tools of the trade Currently utilizing the following AWS services EC2 S3 Property photos Thumbnails Online backups Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) CloudWatch Route53 11
- 12. A bit about Scalr Cloud management solution reduced project risks & ITOPS effort Server Templates Config & Bootstrap Backups Scripts DNS Autoscaling Master Slave Recover Control Convention over Configuration - out-of-the-box automation and scalability 12
- 13. Services under our radar We will utilize additional AWS services whenever that helps us: Reduce in-house ITOPS overheads Scale capacity and performance Enable us to bring new added value services to the market faster Cloudfront Milan node makes it attractive vs our current CDN solution Simple Email Service ElastiCache SimpleDB / DynamoDB Sessions, Logs, Aggregate stats, Personalization etc EMR / HiveQL Xeround or Amazon RDS MySQL as a service 13
- 14. #learnings
- 15. Not a walk in the park From a single server to a scalable solution Deal with sessions Sticky sessions no good when autoscaling (scale downs) Memcache (nodes will die, sessions will be lost) Shared file system (maybe...) or Key-value store Zend Server cluster User uploads Rewrite code to utilize S3 Or just plug in a POSIX compliant NAS solution Database Master-slave needs code changes (Replication lag) You thought splitting SELECTs from INSERTs/UPDATEs is sufficient? Individual nodes will fail – dont' take them for granted Holy grail: share nothing architecture 15
- 16. Continuous improvement It is an iterative process Incrementally add robbustness Measure and collect data (Newrelic, MONyog, sysstat...) Alert (Cloudwatch, monit) Self healing (beware of false positives) Fall gracefully (MRT vs MTBF) Optimize Test out different EC2 Instance Types Once sure, reserve them for significant savings Use Cloudwatch in front of S3 Test autoscaling strategies Scaleup fast, scaledown slow 16
- 17. #questions