12 min
How to maintain availability with multiple AWS accounts Modern Digital Applications with Lee Atchison
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- Technology
In this episode, we know that using multiple availability zones helps increase your application availability and resiliency by distributing our application across multiple disperse data centers. But did you know that availability zones don’t necessarily give you the separation you expect? In fact, it is entirely possible to have two instances of a service running in two distinct availability zones, but actually have them running in the same data center, in the same physical rack, and possibly even on the same physical server! How can this be? And even more importantly, how can we avoid it? The answer involves understanding how availability zones work and how they are structured.
And then, one of the oddest cloud services created is also one of the first cloud services. Before AI and before machine learning, humans actually powered a part of the cloud.
This is, Life with Multiple AWS Accounts.
Links and More Information
The following are links mentioned in this episode, and links to related information:
How to maintain availability when using multiple AWS accounts (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3444860/5-pain-points-of-modern-software-development-and-how-to-overcome-them.html)Modern Digital Applications Website (https://mdacast.com)Lee Atchison Articles and Presentations (https://leeatchison.com)Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media (https://architectingforscale.com)
Distributing Your Application
When building a modern, high-performant application at scale, it’s important to make sure the individual application instances are distributed across a variety of data centers in such a way that if any given data center goes offline, the application can continue to function relatively normally. This is an industry-wide best practice, and an important characteristic to architect into your applications in order to make them sufficiently resilient to data center problems.
The same philosophy occurs when you build your application in the cloud. Except, when you build a cloud-based application, you typically do not have visibility into which data center a particular server or cloud resource is located. This is part of the abstraction that gives the cloud its value.
Not having visibility into which data centers your application is operating in makes it difficult to build multi data center resiliency into your applications.
To solve this problem, AWS created a cloud abstraction of the data center that allows you to build on this level of resiliency without being exposed to the details of data center location. The abstraction is the availability zone.
AWS availability zones
An AWS availability zone is an isolated set of cloud resources that allows specifying a certain level of isolation into your applications. Resources within a single availability zone may be physically or virtually near each other, to the extent that they can be dependent on each other and share subcomponents with each other. For example, two EC2 servers that are in the same availability zone may be in the same data center, in the same rack, or even on the same physical server.
However, cloud resources that are in different availability zones are guaranteed to be separated into distinct data centers. They cannot be in the same data center, they cannot be in the same rack, and they cannot be using the same physical servers. They are distinct and independent from each other.
Hence, the solution to the resiliency problem, you can build your application to live in multiple...
In this episode, we know that using multiple availability zones helps increase your application availability and resiliency by distributing our application across multiple disperse data centers. But did you know that availability zones don’t necessarily give you the separation you expect? In fact, it is entirely possible to have two instances of a service running in two distinct availability zones, but actually have them running in the same data center, in the same physical rack, and possibly even on the same physical server! How can this be? And even more importantly, how can we avoid it? The answer involves understanding how availability zones work and how they are structured.
And then, one of the oddest cloud services created is also one of the first cloud services. Before AI and before machine learning, humans actually powered a part of the cloud.
This is, Life with Multiple AWS Accounts.
Links and More Information
The following are links mentioned in this episode, and links to related information:
How to maintain availability when using multiple AWS accounts (https://www.infoworld.com/article/3444860/5-pain-points-of-modern-software-development-and-how-to-overcome-them.html)Modern Digital Applications Website (https://mdacast.com)Lee Atchison Articles and Presentations (https://leeatchison.com)Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media (https://architectingforscale.com)
Distributing Your Application
When building a modern, high-performant application at scale, it’s important to make sure the individual application instances are distributed across a variety of data centers in such a way that if any given data center goes offline, the application can continue to function relatively normally. This is an industry-wide best practice, and an important characteristic to architect into your applications in order to make them sufficiently resilient to data center problems.
The same philosophy occurs when you build your application in the cloud. Except, when you build a cloud-based application, you typically do not have visibility into which data center a particular server or cloud resource is located. This is part of the abstraction that gives the cloud its value.
Not having visibility into which data centers your application is operating in makes it difficult to build multi data center resiliency into your applications.
To solve this problem, AWS created a cloud abstraction of the data center that allows you to build on this level of resiliency without being exposed to the details of data center location. The abstraction is the availability zone.
AWS availability zones
An AWS availability zone is an isolated set of cloud resources that allows specifying a certain level of isolation into your applications. Resources within a single availability zone may be physically or virtually near each other, to the extent that they can be dependent on each other and share subcomponents with each other. For example, two EC2 servers that are in the same availability zone may be in the same data center, in the same rack, or even on the same physical server.
However, cloud resources that are in different availability zones are guaranteed to be separated into distinct data centers. They cannot be in the same data center, they cannot be in the same rack, and they cannot be using the same physical servers. They are distinct and independent from each other.
Hence, the solution to the resiliency problem, you can build your application to live in multiple...
12 min