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DMG305 - How Intuit Leveraged AWS

OpsWorks as the Engine of Our PaaS

Capen Brinkley and Rick Mendes, Intuit

November 14, 2013

Agenda

• How we got into AWS, and why we’ve decided

to do a PaaS

• Why we chose AWS OpsWorks as our engine

• How we use AWS OpsWorks to build our PaaS

• Q&A

Intuit’s Journey to AWS

Why PaaS?

EC2

CloudFormation

S3

Auto Scaling

Chef

Simple Deploy

Heirloom

Application A Application B

Why AWS OpsWorks?

• Skillset and operational expertise:

• Chef

• AWS services

• Similar operational model

• More controls, compliance, and security than

Elastic Beanstalk could offer

Architecture

Layered

Layers

Intuit Abstraction Layer

AWS OpsWorks

EC2 IAM S3 ELB SQS

Abstraction Layer Benefits

Nomenclature

Intuit AWS OpsWorks

App Stack

Stack Layer

Instance Instance

Build App

Deployment Deployment

Simplicity

Abstraction Layer

• Create app API

• 3 parameters

• All parameters simple

strings

• Users only need to

provide name, app type

and region

AWS OpsWorks

• Create stack API

• 16 parameters

• Parameters mix of simple

strings and elements

• Users need AWS

knowledge to set

parameters

Simplicity – Create Inputs Abstraction Layer

{

"name": "My App",

"app_type": "rails",

"region": "us-west-2"

}

AWS OpsWorks {

"Attributes": {

"string" : "string"

},

"ConfigurationManager": {

"Name": "string",

"Version": "string"

},

"CustomCookbooksSource": {

"Password": "string",

"Revision": "string",

"SshKey": "string",

"Type": "string",

"Url": "string",

"Username": "string"

},

"CustomJson": "string",

"DefaultAvailabilityZone": "string",

"DefaultInstanceProfileArn": "string",

"DefaultOs": "string",

"DefaultRootDeviceType": "string",

"DefaultSshKeyName": "string",

"DefaultSubnetId": "string",

"HostnameTheme": "string",

"Name": "string",

"Region": "string",

"ServiceRoleArn": "string",

"UseCustomCookbooks": "boolean",

"VpcId": "string"

}

Flexibility – Multiple Clients

Behind the Curtain

Continuous Integration

Intuit Package Manager

Intuit Abstraction Layer

Intuit Abstraction Layer

User Vars User, System Vars

Custom JSON

App Instances

App Configuration Variables

Managing Instance Statuses Start/Stop

Intuit Abstraction Layer

Status Request

Info Manager

Transition

Collaborators

App

1

App

2 Dev Group A

(4 users)

Dev Group B (6 users)

QA Group A (2 users)

Technologies

• RESTful APIs

• Ruby on Rails

• AWS SDK Gem

• RDS MySQL

• Opscode Chef

Challenges

• Think differently about Chef code – Things like roles and data bags are not supported yet

• Polling for instance statuses – There are no asynchronous APIs or notifications at this time

• Multi-step deletion of apps – Instances cannot be deleted automatically

Looking Ahead

• Java Support – Should we replace our custom support with AWS OpsWorks

support

• Application Visibility – Access to application logs and application runtimes

• Additional Languages/Frameworks – Expand beyond Ruby and Java

Q & A

Please give us your feedback on this

presentation

As a thank you, we will select prize

winners daily for completed surveys!

DMG305