AWS Compute Blog

This post and accompanying code graciously contributed by:

Huy Huynh Sr. Solutions Architect	Magnus Bjorkman Solutions Architect

Java is a popular language used by many enterprises today. To simplify and accelerate Java application development, many companies are moving from a monolithic to microservices architecture. For some, it has become a strategic imperative. Containerization technology, such as Docker, lets enterprises build scalable, robust microservice architectures without major code rewrites.

In this post, I cover how to containerize a monolithic Java application to run on Docker. Then, I show how to deploy it on AWS using Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), a high-performance container management service. Finally, I show how to break the monolith into multiple services, all running in containers on Amazon ECS.

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Any containerized application typically consists of multiple containers. There are containers for the application itself, a database, possibly a web server, and so on. During development, it’s normal to build and test this multi-container application on a single host. This approach works fine during early dev and test cycles but becomes a single point of failure for production, when application availability is critical.

In such cases, a multi-container application can be deployed on multiple hosts. Customers may need an external tool to manage such multi-container, multi-host deployments. Container orchestration frameworks provides the capability of cluster management, scheduling containers on different hosts, service discovery and load balancing, crash recovery, and other related functionalities. There are multiple options for container orchestration on Amazon Web Services: Amazon ECS, Docker for AWS, and DC/OS.

Another popular option for container orchestration on AWS is Kubernetes. There are multiple ways to run a Kubernetes cluster on AWS. This multi-part blog series provides a brief overview and explains some of these approaches in detail. This first post explains how to create a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using kops. (more…)

This post and accompanying code was generously contributed by:

Jeremy Cowan Solutions Architect	Anuj Sharma DevOps Cloud Architect	Peter Dalbhanjan Solutions Architect

Deploying software updates in traditional non-containerized environments is hard and fraught with risk. When you write your deployment package or script, you have to assume that the target machine is in a particular state. If your staging environment is not an exact mirror image of your production environment, your deployment could fail. These failures frequently cause outages that persist until you re-deploy the last known good version of your application. If you are an Operations Manager, this is what keeps you up at night.

Increasingly, customers want to do testing in production environments without exposing customers to the new version until the release has been vetted. Others want to expose a small percentage of their customers to the new release to gather feedback about a feature before it’s released to the broader population. This is often referred to as canary analysis or canary testing. In this post, I introduce patterns to implement blue/green and canary deployments using Application Load Balancers and target groups.

If you’d like to try this approach to blue/green deployments, we have open sourced the code and AWS CloudFormation templates in the ecs-blue-green-deployment GitHub repo. The workflow builds an automated CI/CD pipeline that deploys your service onto an ECS cluster and offers a controlled process to swap target groups when you’re ready to promote the latest version of your code to production. You can quickly set up the environment in three steps and see the blue/green swap in action. We’d love for you to try it and send us your feedback!

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Constantin Gonzalez is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS

In my free time, I run a small blog that uses Amazon S3 to host static content and Amazon CloudFront to distribute it world-wide. I use a home-grown, static website generator to create and upload my blog content onto S3.

My blog uses two S3 buckets: one for staging and testing, and one for production. As a website owner, I want to update the production bucket with all changes from the staging bucket in a reliable and efficient way, without having to create and populate a new bucket from scratch. Therefore, to synchronize files between these two buckets, I use AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions.

In this post, I show how you can use Step Functions to build a scalable synchronization engine for S3 buckets and learn some common patterns for designing Step Functions state machines while you do so. (more…)

Juan Villa – Partner Solutions Architect

When most people hear “Java” they think of Java the programming language. Java is a lot more than a programming language, it also implies a larger ecosystem including the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Java, the programming language, is just one of the many languages that can be compiled to run on the JVM. Some of the most popular JVM languages, other than Java, are Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, JRuby, and Jython (see this link for a list of more JVM languages).

Did you know that you can compile and subsequently run all these languages on AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda supports the Java 8 runtime, but this does not mean you are limited to the Java language. The Java 8 runtime is capable of running JVM languages such as Kotlin and Groovy once they have been compiled and packaged as a “fat” JAR (a JAR file containing all necessary dependencies and classes bundled in).

In this blog post we’ll work through building AWS Lambda functions in both Kotlin and Groovy programming languages. To compile and package our projects we will use Gradle build tool.

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Stephen Liedig, Solutions Architect

One of the many challenges professional software architects and developers face is how to make cloud-native applications scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available.

Fundamental to your project success is understanding the importance of making systems highly cohesive and loosely coupled. That means considering the multi-dimensional facets of system coupling to support the distributed nature of the applications that you are building for the cloud.

By that, I mean addressing not only the application-level coupling (managing incoming and outgoing dependencies), but also considering the impacts of of platform, spatial, and temporal coupling of your systems. Platform coupling relates to the interoperability (or lack thereof) of heterogeneous systems components. Spatial coupling deals with managing components at a network topology level or protocol level. Temporal, or runtime coupling, refers to the ability of a component within your system to do any kind of meaningful work while it is performing a synchronous, blocking operation.

The AWS messaging services, Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS, help you deal with these forms of coupling by providing mechanisms for:

• Reliable, durable, and fault-tolerant delivery of messages between application components
• Logical decomposition of systems and increased autonomy of components
• Creating unidirectional, non-blocking operations, temporarily decoupling system components at runtime
• Decreasing the dependencies that components have on each other through standard communication and network channels

Following on the recent topic, Building Scalable Applications and Microservices: Adding Messaging to Your Toolbox, in this post, I look at some of the ways you can introduce SQS and SNS into your architectures to decouple your components, and show how you can implement them using C#. (more…)

Ed Lima, Solutions Architect

Our identities are what define us as human beings. Philosophical discussions aside, it also applies to our day-to-day lives. For instance, I need my work badge to get access to my office building or my passport to travel overseas. My identity in this case is attached to my work badge or passport. As part of the system that checks my access, these documents or objects help define whether I have access to get into the office building or travel internationally.

This exact same concept can also be applied to cloud applications and APIs. To provide secure access to your application users, you define who can access the application resources and what kind of access can be granted. (more…)

Michael G. Khmelnitsky, Senior Programmer Writer

Sometimes, messages can’t be processed because of a variety of possible issues, such as erroneous conditions within the producer or consumer application. For example, if a user places an order within a certain number of minutes of creating an account, the producer might pass a message with an empty string instead of a customer identifier. Occasionally, producers and consumers might fail to interpret aspects of the protocol that they use to communicate, causing message corruption or loss. Also, the consumer’s hardware errors might corrupt message payload. For these reasons, messages that can’t be processed in a timely manner are delivered to a dead-letter queue. (more…)

This post was graciously contributed by:

Chad Schmutzer Solutions Architect	Shawn O’Connor Solutions Architect

Today we are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports the ability to launch your ECS cluster on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances directly from the ECS console.

Spot Instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 compute capacity. Spot Instances typically cost 50-90% less than On-Demand Instances. Powering your ECS cluster with Spot Instances lets you reduce the cost of running your existing containerized workloads, or increase your compute capacity by two to ten times while keeping the same budget. Or you could do a combination of both!

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Aaron Friedman is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect at AWS

Angel Pizarro is a Scientific Computing Technical Business Development Manager at AWS

This post is the fourth in a series on how to build a genomics workflow on AWS. In Part 1, we introduced a general architecture, shown below, and highlighted the three common layers in a batch workflow:

• Job
• Batch
• Workflow

In Part 2, you built a Docker container for each job that needed to run as part of your workflow, and stored them in Amazon ECR.

In Part 3, you tackled the batch layer and built a scalable, elastic, and easily maintainable batch engine using AWS Batch. This solution took care of dynamically scaling your compute resources in response to the number of runnable jobs in your job queue length as well as managed job placement. (more…)