Autoscaling Best Practices

Autoscaling Best Practices FOSDEM’14

Marc Cluet DevOps & Automation Advisory Rackspace

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gozalewis/3422530465/

RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.CO.UK

Who am I?!Marc Cluet (@lynxman)

More than 16 years of experience as a SysAdmin Founding member of Juju and MAAS while at Canonical Leading a DevOps Engineering Team at Rackspace Likes DevOps, programming and long walks on the beach


What is Rackspace?!Founded in 1998 in San Antonio, TX by three guys that wanted to create a hosting company Home of Fanatical Support /o/ Second biggest Public Cloud in the world OpenStack Project co-founder


What is Autoscaling?!



WASTED! $$$!





The ability to automatically or semi-automatically scale up and down a group of servers based on computing or traffic demand by provisioning new services!

RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.CO.UK http://www.flickr.com/photos/fischerfotos/7419253200/


Traffic Patterns!


Traffic Patterns!ON & OFF!

Analytics!Banks/Tax Agencies!Test environments!


Traffic Patterns!FAST GROWTH!

Events!Business Growth!Slashdot Effect!


Traffic Patterns!VARIABLE!

News & Media!Event Registrations!Rapid fire sales!


Traffic Patterns!CONSISTENT!

HR Application!Accounting/Finance!E-mail!

RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.CO.UK http://www.flickr.com/photos/maximalideal/3356408693/


Autoscaling Methodologies!

Time Based!Reactive!

Predictive!


Time Based Autoscaling!

Load Balancer

Server Server



Load Balancer

Server Server

9:00am!



Load Balancer

Server Server

Nov 1st!



Load Balancer

Server Server Server


Time Based Autoscaling!GOOD FOR!

On & Off!Consistent!


Reactive Autoscaling!

Load Balancer

Server 60%

Server 60%



Load Balancer

Server 80%

Server 80%



Load Balancer

Server 60%

Server 60%

Server 40%



Load Balancer

Server 30%

Server 30%

Server 30%



Load Balancer

Server 45%

Server 45%


Reactive Autoscaling!GOOD FOR!

Fast Growth!Variable!


Predictive Autoscaling!

Load Balancer

Server Server



Load Balancer

Server Server

Forecasted!Traffic!+30%!



Load Balancer

Server Server Server


Predictive Autoscaling!GOOD FOR!

Fast Growth!Variable!

RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.CO.UK http://www.flickr.com/photos/samuraislice/3309481048/


Autoscaling Tools!


Autoscaling Tools!Amazon Cloudformation!

Based on Scaling Groups!High/Low Watermark!Scheduled Events!Uses base image + CF!


Autoscaling Tools!Rackspace Autoscale!

Based on Scaling Groups!High/Low Watermark!Scheduled Events!Uses Gold Image!


Autoscaling Tools!Rightscale Autoscale!

Based on Scaling Groups!High/Low Watermark Quorum!Scheduled Events!Uses Rightscale scripts!$$$!


Autoscaling Tools!Heat!

Based on Templates!High/Low Watermark!Scheduled Events!Uses Heat Scripts!DSL Compatible with CF!


Autoscaling Tools!Scryer!

Based on AI!Predictive Fidelity model!Feeds AWS API!


Autoscaling Tools!Your own!!

Collect your metrics!!collectd, diamond, statsd!

Have a good metrics database!!whisper, rrd!


Autoscaling Tools!Your own!!

Write your own autoscaling code!!with message queues! :)!!attached to your code!!brain close to the centre of decision!

RACKSPACE® HOSTING | WWW.RACKSPACE.CO.UK http://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915@N05/6355318323/


Taking the most of it!Beware of the Kraken!!

Autoscaling can be dangerous!Have min-max allocations!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liquidnight/5992114196/


Taking the most of it!Choose the right metrics!

Stay with basic metrics!!CPU, mem, I/O disk/net!

Review autoscaling strategy with metrics!


Taking the most of it!Choose your strategy!

Scale up early!Scale down slowly!Don’t apply the same strategy to all apps!


Taking the most of it!Phasing in and Phasing Out!

Have in mind time to availability!Have in mind also decommission time!Golden Images can help speed!

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@lynxman!

http://slideshare.net/lynxmanuk/!

http://www.rackspace.co.uk/technicalservices/ !

!

Autoscaling Best Practices

Technology

rackspace hosting

autoscaling tools

reactive autoscaling

rackspace autoscale

predictive autoscaling

autoscaling code

time based autoscaling

autoscaling methodologies