Here is a detailed summary of the key takeaways from the video transcript in a markdown format:
AP's Journey to Resilient Architecture on AWS
Introduction
- Dominic delmolino, VP of Field Technology and Engineering for AWS Worldwide Public Sector, introduces the session.
- The Associated Press (AP) is a trusted source of fast, accurate, and objective news. They have no quiet season - every day can be the busiest day.
- AP has partnered with AWS to build a resilient architecture that can scale and stay up during large events and high traffic.
The Importance of Resilience
- Downtime can be expensive in terms of revenue, brand reputation, productivity, and regulatory concerns.
- Resilience is the ability of a workload to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions and mitigate issues like misconfigurations or network problems.
- Resilience is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer.
AWS Region and Multi-Region Strategies
- AWS Regions are designed to be highly resilient, with multiple Availability Zones (AZs) separated by meaningful physical distance.
- Not every workload needs to be multi-region, but AWS provides different multi-region strategies for disaster recovery based on recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
AP's Resilience Journey
- AP started with a lift-and-shift approach to move to the cloud, but soon realized that it was not enough to take full advantage of AWS.
- AP's journey involved:
- Modernizing applications beyond just lift-and-shift
- Carefully evaluating the need for multi-region architecture
- Aggressively pursuing simplicity in their solutions
Key Takeaways
- App Modernization: Innovation accelerates beyond lift-and-shift.
- Multi-Region Requires Careful Evaluation: Not every workload needs to be multi-region.
- Aggressively Pursue Simplicity: AP built simple patterns to meet their data replication and tolerance needs.
AP's Technical Approach
- AP built a serverless, event-driven platform using AWS services like API Gateway, Lambda, S3, SQS, and SNS.
- Data replication was a key challenge, and AP used S3 events, DynamoDB Global Tables, and custom event emulation to meet their latency requirements.
- Health checks and observability are critical, with AP using a combination of Lambda functions, S3, and DynamoDB to provide fast, accurate health information.
- AP also embraced chaos engineering principles to test the resilience of their systems.
AWS Services and Patterns for Resilience
- AWS provides various services and patterns to help build resilient workloads, including:
- AWS Resilience Hub
- AWS Fault Injection Service
- Amazon Application Recovery Controller
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Service (DRS)
Conclusion
- AP's journey highlights the importance of app modernization, careful evaluation of multi-region requirements, and the pursuit of simplicity in building resilient architectures.
- Attendees are encouraged to explore the recommended AWS services and patterns, as well as upcoming sessions featuring other customer stories.