Building a Highly Available Web Application on AWS
Nowadays, the audience of web applications demands high speed, stability, and availability of the application. For extraordinarily high availability of your application, it is vital to deal with issues of system participation even when some failures occur High availability (HA) is essential to know how exactly your application behaves under different loads and to remain online as much as possible.
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What is AWS in Web Application?
AWS or Amazon Web Services is one of the most versatile, scalable and most popular cloud computing services put forward by Amazon which lets businesses and developers host, manage and grow their web applications. AWS utilizes many tools and services which concern almost all the processes in computing, storing, using databases, networking, using machine learning and others. This is mostly used in creation and deployment of web application since it provides scalability, flexibility and high availability with low initial investment.
Amazon Web Services offer a vast variety of services and resources that make it possible to create, launch and manage web applications and services. AWS provides all the ingredients of computing power, storage, networking, and security to host and run a high availability and performance web application. AWS has high flexibility and reliability, so when using this tool you can create high-speed and highly protected applications which can significantly save money and cover the need for infrastructure.
Looking at the example of a website builder and an enterprise web application, AWS has all the services you require.
AWS provides a rich set of services for developers and application administrators to build their web applications that can cater for its availability, failure and scalability requirements. In this blog, I will discuss the major part and various design strategies about how to create a highly available web application on AWS.
What Is High Availability (HA)?
High Availability means a set scenario where an organization’s operations are to continue unhampered though system hardware, network or any other component proves faulty. The availability of high is possible when resources are spread across various AZs and there is proper failover mechanisms that can check for faults and rectify them on its own.
In AWS speak, HA refers intend to use Availability Zones, regions, and the service provided by AWS to implement redundancies and to be tolerant to failure.
Key Components for a Highly Available Web Application on AWS:
To build a highly available web application on AWS, you need to focus on the following core components:
Compute – known Amazon as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instances.
Load Balancer (AWS – Elastic Load Balancer)
Storage (Amazon S3, EBS, RDS)
GP Networking (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Route 53)
Auto Scaling
Now let us consider each of these component in more detail.
1. Compute Resources: EC2 Instances Across Multiple Availability Zones
The fundamental compute elements of your web application are residential on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances. These are computer systems which are virtual that meet the computational needs of your application.
Best Practice:
To maintain high availability place your EC2 instances in as many Availability Zones as possible. AWS AZs are individual sites within a region that could contain separate power, network, and cooling structures, which are designed not to impact other, AZs.
Use Multiple AZs: It is recommended that your EC2 instances are placed in at least two or more availability zones. For this reason, if one AZ is offline due to power loss, network issue, and the likes, the application can still be reached through other AZs that are also in existence.
Fault-Tolerant Architecture: It is recommended to spread typically production web servers, application servers, and other important back-end services and-processing systems across different Availability Zones in order to avoid a single point of failure.
2. Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
Good news is that this is quite easy to do since in order to distribute the traffic to several EC2 instances you’ll be needing a Load Balancer. Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) that helps to load incoming traffic across different instances of the EC2.
Best Practice:
For HTTP/HTTPS traffic, it is recommended to Make an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and HTTP/HTTPS traffic and for TCP traffic it is recommended to make a Network Load Balancer (NLB). Routing decisions can be implemented into the ALBs targeted at URL paths, hostnames, or HTTP headers, that makes ALBs suitable for web applications.
Enable Auto Scaling with Load Balancers: Link your ELB with Auto Scaling so that the traffic is balanced, and the new instances are generally added when the traffic rises.
Since traffic and load are spread out between different EC2 instances across various AZs, ELBs also protect against overload of any specific server making both, availability and performance, better.
3. Storage: Durable and Scalable Storage Solutions
Every web application hosted needs to store data and within the AWS cloud, there are multiple options for storage services. For a highly available architecture, guarantee your storage is both, fail resilient and elastic.
Amazon S3: Whenever there is a need for storing fixed or unchanging data such as images, videos or files, object storage or Amazon S3 becomes a good service for sustaining extreme durability and scalability.” S3 data is then stored and is also, by default, replicated across multiple Availability Zones in a region for availability and durability respectively.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store): For the long-duration block level storage utilized by an EC2 instance, Amazon EBS has the feature of high availability, this is because the data is copied within an AZ. for example data back-up on EBS can be done through a process known as EBS Snapshot whereby you can regularly take backup of data in case of failure you can retrieve the data.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): For data storage Amazon RDS provides managed database instances for standard Database like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL server. There is also the Multi-AZ deployments for which it is probable to capture a failover that replicates your data throughout different AZs and your database stays on.
Best Practice:
Amazon S3 provide a cheap and highly scalable solution for storing static content that are required for redundancy.
EBS is well suited for EC2 storage which constitutes data that needs to be continually available.
High availability of the databases should be done through the use of RDS Multi-AZ deployments.
4. Networking: Amazon VPC and Route 53
Networking forms one of the most important sub categories of high availability. For there to be secure ways through, whereby resources can communicate efficiently, you should design a network.
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): A VPC is a logically isolated network provided by AWS in which you may put your resources. In your VPC, you are able to design multiple subnets where each can be linked to various Availability Zones. It ensures that web server has public subnets and database and application have there own private subnets.
Route 53: Amazon Route 53 is a DNS service that is always available and automatically scales to direct user traffic to the nearest available endpoint, to enhance both latency and availability. Route 53 also includes health check features that identifies unhealthy instances and route traffic to the healthy ones.
Best Practice:
Setup a VPC with mutiple subnets across different availability zones for better up time.
Route53 is used with DNS and health checks and can route traffic to another instance or AZ if necessary.
5. Auto Scaling: Automatically Adjusting to Traffic Load
Other important aspect for developers is the capacity of AWS to automatically manage application loads. Auto Scaling enables one to achieve high availability since the number of EC2 instances compensates for changes in workload.
Best Practice:
Primarily, create an Auto Scaling Group to achieve targets of dynamic scaling for the EC2 instances.
Link the Auto Scaling with your Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to enable new instances in the cluster to automatically become load balanced.
Auto Scaling permits an application to always be ready for traffic surge beyond firm intervention while reducing cost in low traffic period.
Additional Best Practices for High Availability
Monitor and Alerting: Check your EC2 instances, ELB, RDS databases, and other facilities utilizing Amazon CloudWatch. Configure CloudWatch Alarms to notify you when resource consumptions ratios exceed or when health check instances are unsuccessful.
Backup and Disaster Recovery: Learn to perform backup with either AWS Backup or EBS Snapshots and make sure you always have contingency plans for disaster recovery. AWS also provides such things as AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for your application across regions’ recovery.
Decouple Components: If you need to have loose coupling between parts of your application, use Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) or SNS (Simple Notification Service). This helps prevent the case of one or several compartments to completely fail and bring down the overall application down.
Designing and constructing a highly available web application requires proper design when dealing with AWS. Using AWS – EC2, ELB, RDS, S3, and 53 as the primary AWS service, you are able to build a fault-tolerant and automatically-scalable infrastructure environment which is able to have self-healing characteristics.
To recap, here are the key strategies for ensuring high availability:
Use availability zones for EC2.
When you want to control traffic and aim at improving fault tolerance, then you can use Elastic Load Balancer.
Continue to store your data in fully-managed services like S3, EBS and RDS in Multi-AZ configurations.
DNS failover and monitoring should be done by utilizing Route 53.
Use Elasticity Through Auto Scaling for management of traffic variability.
When implemented, these best practices will help you achieve maximum high availability with a focus on the user, so important in a web application, regardless of any obstacles that may occur.
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