Application modernization to meet a growing global demand (IMP211)

Just Serve's Cloud Migration Journey

Introduction

  • The speaker, Mike George, introduces the topic of the video - Just Serve's journey in migrating to the cloud.
  • Just Serve is a website that links volunteer needs of a community to those willing to volunteer.
  • The talk will be presented by Steve Coleman, the portfolio architect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

About Just Serve

  • Just Serve launched in 2012 in Silicon Valley, California, as a free platform to connect volunteers and organizations.
  • It has grown to over 1 million users, with over 17,000 organizations listing more than 150,000 projects.

Initial Challenges

  • Just Serve started with a simple 3-tier architecture, with a single data center in the Western United States.
  • This posed several challenges:
    • Serving traffic from a single data center did not align with their plans to grow globally.
    • Serving static assets from the frontend web servers was not an ideal solution for user experience, especially in areas with limited bandwidth.
    • Scaling the application was a manual and time-consuming process, requiring weeks of advanced planning.
    • The monolithic architecture made it difficult to optimize the application and the development team.

Cloud Migration Journey

  • Just Serve's goals were to have a scalable, resilient, and global application.
  • They migrated to the cloud, using the following components:
    • CloudFront to serve static assets from S3, improving global user experience and cost/performance.
    • ECS Fargate for the application layer, enabling auto-scaling and seamless integration with Elastic Load Balancing.
    • Amazon Aurora for the database, along with a caching layer using DynamoDB.
    • Serverless architecture for a newsletter subscription feature, using API Gateway, Lambda, and SQS.
  • This cloud migration enabled better DevSecOps practices, such as:
    • Infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, with ephemeral test environments.
    • Improved observability and understanding of cloud costs and optimization.

Challenges Faced

  • Sudden spikes in traffic caused issues with Aurora not being able to scale quickly enough.
    • Moved to Aurora Serverless, but still faced challenges with sudden traffic increases.
  • Developers accustomed to persistent access to resources had to adapt to the new model of isolated accounts and VPCs, with the need for Bastion hosts and short-lived credentials.
  • Treating infrastructure as fungible, replaceable resources was a new paradigm for many developers.

Recommendations

  • Understand your application's components, dependencies, and data access patterns to make informed architecture choices.
  • Define the business drivers and expected benefits of the cloud migration to stay focused.
  • Don't wait to start the migration process - start small and learn as you go.

Conclusion

  • The speaker emphasizes the urgency of addressing real and growing needs in the community, and encourages the audience to start building and serving those needs today.

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