31–40 of 106 posts
I also wonder if in reality there were only one or two instances in each zone for each site behind the ELBs and the others were added to show how scalable the infrastructure is; or if their number actually did correspond to the avg. number of instances they ended up having to spin up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon hosted all these servers for free?
All of you should know that this was paid with campaign dollars, not government funds. To pretend otherwise is an incredible indictment of our education system and an example of the assault on k-12 civics courses.
What I can see makes me a bit curious.
- Frontend Web boxes are "big", where the (some) of the backend App boxes are small. I'd have though it would be the reverse -- frontend horizontally scaled first, backend vertically scaled first.
- Sometimes they use Zones ABC, sometimes AB. This is cool, but a lot of the "front" infrastructure is AB (including www), so not sure what advantage having ABC on backend pieces are. These are obviously super-critical for some special reason? I guess they also might be pieces that are-not/only-partially replicated to the secondary site.
- The failover US-West site is using Asgard along with Puppet, but the primary US-East one isn't. I guess this is for managing failure scenarios?
- Prodigious use of a lot of AWS services. Including internal ELBs all over the place. SQL Server and PostgreSQL sneak in a few places.
- Couldn't find the CDN!
- Looks like staging and testing are a complete replica (hard to tell, the resolution isn't quite there). They're big though. This is fine, but raises the question why the secondary site is just a part replica? If you provision the lot to stage, you'd figure you'd run the secondary the same way?
- The Data Warehouse runs on the secondary site, but it only accessed from the primary. Interesting. Wonder why they just didn't put it on the primary?
Is this not rendering for anyone else? Latest ubuntu + chrome. All I get is black.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of you should know that this was paid with campaign dollars, not government funds. To pretend otherwise is an incredible indictment of our education system and an example of the assault on k-12 civics courses.
We have K-12 civics courses?
"Oh, you run 10 servers and 2 load balancers across these 2 sub-systems? Here's 2 servers and a toy whistle for staging."
But then again, I suppose that's what you get when you can dump hundreds of millions of dollars on a problem over a couple years.
Where did this lovely map come from and how can I generate my own?
I'd love to describe a network in (something like) graphviz dot notation and get a diagram that looks like this out the other end. Usually I wind up just using Visio and doing it by hand because work pays for it anyway, and it's actually very nice.
Harper Reed and Scott VanDenPlas did a talk / Q&A at the Chicago AWS meetup group a few months ago. My hazy recollection of the salient points of the talk: 1) This represents a heterogenous set of services where the engineers in charge of each service were more-or-less free to use whatever technology stack they were most comfortable with. 2) Use puppet for provisioning everything. (There is some subtlety Scott went i…