Learning How to Architect with a Design for Failure Approach

During the last days, we launched some new courses who are getting quite a success, and we got some great feedback about them. But one of them really hit it big and achieved a resounding success: How to Architect with a Design for Failure Approach that is how to build high-availability architectures on AWS considering the many possible ways the various pieces of your infrastructure can suddenly fail.

Kevin Felichko is the experienced Cloud Architect who crafted this course and tailored it to explain rather tough concepts with a very easy approach. Taking a simple example, the installation of a small RoR application, Kevin shows how to take advantage of some advanced services in the AWS family to build up an infrastructure that is resilient enough to sustain many different failures in its core components. At the end of the course, you will have learned how to obtain five 9’s of availability, that is an uptime of 99.999%, which is the gold standard in the IT world and implies no more than 5 and half minutes of downtime over a whole year!

The two key components of the mix availability-wise are of course Auto-Scaling and ELB, the two of whom will be configured on purpose to maintain active connections with a number of EC2 instances adequate enough to sustain the load of requests in any condition. EC2 and RDS, instead, are the engine of the infrastructure, being respectively the place where the web app is deployed and where the web app’s data is stored. Kevin will go into details here to teach us how to properly configure both the instances and the database replicas we will need to keep the data always available. Eventually, Route 53 and CloudFront are added to the mix and the final lecture is dedicated to the delicate topic of expanding the architecture to a multi-region scenario, which might be challenging to achieve without adequate knowledge.

It’s an advanced course, so better come with some preparation for the main services discussed in the course to really get it. You should be proficient with EC2, S3, and RDS, and know at least the basic principles of AutoScaling, ELB, VPC, Route53, and CloudFront.

If you’re looking to further your skills on AWS, Cloud Academy’s AWS Training Library are there and available to you to improve your knowledge of the cloud.