A multi-dimensional approach helps you proactively prepare for failures, Part 2: Infrastructure layer
AWS Architecture BlogA multi-dimensional approach helps you proactively prepare for failures, Part 2: Infrastructure layerby Piyali Kamra, Aish Gopalan, Isael Pimentel, and Aditi Sharma | on26 AUG 2022| inAmazon Route 53,Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS),Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3),Architecture,AWS Direct Connect,AWS Lambda|Permalink|ShareDistributed applications resiliency is a cumulative resiliency of applications, infrastructure, and operational processes.Part 1 of this seriesexplored application layer resiliency. In Part 2, we discuss how using Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services, redundancy, high availability, and infrastructure failover patterns based on recovery time and point objectives (RTO and RPO, respectively) can help in building more resilient infrastructures.Pattern 1: Recognize high impact/likelihood infrastructure failuresTo ensure cloud infrastructure resilience, we need to understand the likelihood and impact of various infrastructure failures, so we can mitigate them. Figure 1 illustrates that most of the failures with high likelihood happen because of operator error or poor deployments.Automated testing, automated deployments, and solid design patterns can mitigate these failures. There could be datacenter failures—like whole rack failures—but deploying applications using auto scaling and multi-availability zone (multi-AZ) deployment, plusresilient AWS cloud native services, can mitigate the impact.Figure 1. Likelihood and impact of failure eventsAs demonstrated in the Figure 1,infrastructure resiliencyis a combination ofhigh availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). HA involves increasing the availability of the system by implementing redundancy among the application components and removing single points of failure.Application layer decisions, like creating stateless applications, make it simpler to implement HA at the infrastructure layer by allowing it to scale using Auto Scaling groups and distributing the redundant applications across multiple AZs.Pattern 2: Understanding and controlling infrastructure failuresBuilding a resilient infrastructure requires understanding which infrastructure failures are under control and which ones are not, as demonstrated in Figure 2.These insights allow us to automate the detection of failures, control them, and employ pro-active patterns, such asstatic stability, to mitigate the need to scale up the infrastructure by over-provisioning it in advance.Figure 2. Proactively designing systems in the event of failureTheinfrastructure decisionsunder our control that can increase the infrastructure resiliency of our system, include:AWS services have control and data planes designed for minimum blast radius. Data planes typically have higher availability design goals than control planes and are usually less complex. When implementing recovery or mitigation responses to events that can affect resiliency, using control plane operations can lower the overall resiliency of your architectures. For example,Amazon Route 53 (Route 53)has a data plane designed for a 100% availability SLA.A good fail-over mechanism should rely on the data plane and not the control plane, as explained inCreating Disaster Recovery Mechanisms Using Amazon Route 53.Understanding networking design and routes implemented in a virtual private cloud (VPC) are critical when testing the flow of traffic in our application. Understanding the flow of traffic helps us design better applications and see how one component failure can affect overall ingress/egress traffic. To achieve better network resiliency, it’s important to implement a good subnet strategy and manage our IP addresses to avoid fail-over issues and asymmetric routing in hybrid architectures. UseIP address management toolsfor established subnet strategies and routing decisions.When designing VPCs and AZs, understanding the service limits, deploying independent routing tables and components in each zone increases availability. For example, highly available NAT gateways are preferred over NAT instances, as noted in thecomparisonprovided in the Amazon VPC documentation.Pattern 3: Considering different ways of increasing HA at the infrastructure layerAs already detailed, infrastructure resiliency = HA + DR.Different ways by which system availability can be increased include:Building for redundancy:Redundancy is the duplication of application components toincrease the overall availabilityof the distributed system. After following application layer best practices, we can build auto healing mechanisms at the infrastructure layer.We can take advantage of auto scaling features and useAmazon CloudWatchmetrics and alarms to set up auto scaling triggers and deploy redundant copies of our applications across multiple AZs. This protects workloads fromAZ failures, as shown in Figure 3.Figure 3. Redundancy increases availabilityAuto scale your infrastructure:When there are AZ failures, infrastructure auto scaling maintainsthe desired number of redundant components, which helps maintain thebase level application throughput. This way, HA system and manage costs are maintained. Auto scaling uses metrics toscale in and out, appropriately, as shown in Figure 4.Figure 4. How auto scaling improves availabilityImplement resilient network connectivity patterns:While building highly resilient distributed systems, network access to AWS infrastructure also needs to be highly resilient. While deploying hybrid applications, the capacity needed for hybrid applications to communicate with their cloud native application counterparts is an important consideration in designing the network access usingAWS Direct Connector VPNs.Testing failover and fallback scenarios helps validate that network paths operate as expected and routes fail over as expected to meet RTO objectives. As the number of connection points between the data center and AWS VPCs increases, a hub and spoke configuration provided by the Direct Connect gateway and transit gateways simplify network topology, testing, and fail over. For more information, visit theAWS Direct Connect Resiliency Recommendations.Whenever possible, use the AWS networking backboneto increase security, resiliency, and lower cost.AWS PrivateLinkprovides secure access to AWS services and exposes the application’s functionalities and APIs to other business units or partner accounts hosted on AWS.Security appliances need to be set up in HA configuration, so that even if one AZ is unavailable, security inspection can be taken over by the redundant appliances in the other AZs.Think ahead about DNS resolution:DNS is a critical infrastructure component; hybrid DNS resolution should be designed carefully with Route 53 HA inbound and outbound resolver endpoints instead of using self-managed proxies.Implement a good strategy to share DNS resolver rules across AWS accounts and VPC’s with Resource Access Manager. Network failover tests are an important part of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. To learn more, visitSet up integrated DNS resolution for hybrid networks in Amazon Route 53.Use managed services:The same concept of redundancy in application components affecting availability applies to AWS infrastructure components. AWS services, likeAWS Lambda,Amazon Simple Queue Service,Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), andAmazon Simple Storage Service, use multiple AZs under the hood for resiliency.Additionally, ELB uses health checks to make sure that requests will route to another component if the underlying traffic application component fails. This improves the distributed system’s availability, as it is the cumulative availability of all different layers in our system. Figure 5 details advantages of some AWS managed services.Figure 5. AWS managed services help in building resilient infrastructures (click the image to enlarge)Pattern 4: Use RTO and RPO requirements to determine the correct failover strategy for your applicationCapture RTO and RPO requirements early on to determine solid failover strategies (Figure 6). Disaster recovery strategies within AWS range from low cost and complexity (like backup and restore), to more complex strategies when lower values of RTO and RPO are required.Inpilot light and warm standby, only the primary region receives traffic. Pilot light only critical infrastructure components run in the backup region. Automation is used to check failures in the primary region using health checks and other metrics.When health checks fail, use a combination of auto scaling groups, automation, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for quick deployment of other infrastructure components.Note:This strategy depends on control plane availability in the secondary region for deploying the resources; keep this point in mind if you don’t have compute pre-provisioned in the secondary region. Carefully consider the business requirements and a distributed system’s application-level characteristics before deciding on a failover strategy. To understand all the factors and complexities involved in each of these disaster recovery strategies refer todisaster recovery options in the cloud.Figure 6. Relationship between RTO, RPO, cost, data loss, and length of service interruptionConclusionIn Part 2 of this series, we discovered that infrastructure resiliency is a combination of HA and DR. It is important to consider likelihood and impact of different failure events on availability requirements.Building in application layer resiliency patterns (Part 1 of this series), along with early discovery of the RTO/RPO requirements, as well as operational and process resiliency of an organization helps in choosing the right managed services and putting in place the appropriate failover strategies for distributed systems.It’s important to differentiate between normal and abnormal load threshold for applications in order to put automation, alerts, and alarms in place. This allows us to auto scale our infrastructure for normal expected load, plus implement corrective action and automation to root out issues in case of abnormal load. Use IaC for quick failover and test failover processes.Stay tuned for Part 3, in which we discuss operational resiliency!TAGS:OptimizationPiyali KamraPiyali Kamra is a seasoned enterprise architect and a hands-on technologist who has over 21 years of experience building and executing large scale enterprise IT projects across geographies.She believes that building large scale enterprise systems is not an exact science but more like an art, where you can’t always choose the best technology that comes to one’s mind but rather tools and technologies must be carefully selected based on the team’s culture , strengths , weaknesses and risks , in tandem with having a futuristic vision as to how you want to shape your product a few years down the road.Aish GopalanAish Gopalan is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS based out of the beautiful city of Atlanta, Georgia. Primarily an individual contributor, she has worn multiple hats ranging from Solution Architect, Application Architect, Cloud Transformation Delivery Lead and Developer in her 16yr software journey. Always chipper, she enjoys and follows Crossfit and believes in living for the moment.Isael PimentelIsael Pimentel is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS with over 15 years of experience in developing and managing complex infrastructures, and holds several certifications including AWS Solution Architect, AWS Network Specialty, AWS Security Speciality, MSCA, and CCNA.Aditi SharmaAditi Sharma is a Technical Account Manager in AWS and started her journey as a Cloud Support Engineer in the RDS Databases team where she worked on various DB engines. She has since then held several roles in AWS before moving to Technical Account Manager role. Prior to joining AWS, she was working as a Software Development Engineer in a Banking industry. Aditi hold Master’s in Management Information systems and Bachelor’s in Computer Science Engineering and also Certified Scrum Master, Product Owner and AWS Associate Solutions Architect.
Distributed applications resiliency is a cumulative resiliency of applications, infrastructure, and operational processes. Part 1 of this series explored application layer resiliency. In Part 2, we discuss how using Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed services, redundancy, high availability, and infrastructure failover patterns based on recovery time and point objectives (RTO and RPO, respectively) can help in […]
Piyali Kamra
Amazon Route 53 Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Architecture AWS Direct Connect AWS Lambda