This self-paced workshop takes to step by step building multi-region active-active serverless architecture. The web application is a Bookstore. This can be used as a reference architecture for highly available ecommerce store.
Key points on implementation
- Highly available
- Active-Active
- Multi-Region
- The content marketing and blogging framework
- Ecommerce flow to purchase, manage the cart, checkout, order history and best seller products
- It is a Cloud-Ready
- The application can failover to another region with RTO and RPO of less than 15 minutes
- RTO: Recovery Time Objective – the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster.
- RPO: Recovery Point Objective – the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from a service due to a major incident.
The application will utilize four layers:
- An Wordpress layer for the book blog posts, using AWS Fargate and RDS.
- An UI layer built using HTML, Javascript (ReactJS) and CSS and hosted directly from AWS S3.
- An API layer built using Node.js running on AWS Lambda and exposed via Amazon API Gateway.
- A data layer storing book and order information in DynamoDB and Elasticache.
For the purposes of this workshop, our failover is focused on the path from our application (in this case, a web application) through API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB.
The backend components are replicated to the second region so that it can be failovered in the event of a disaster. All data in DynamoDB, S3, Aurora MySQL will be replicated from the primary region to the secondary region ensures that our application data will be available when we failover.
Application components
- Web application blueprint – We include a React web application pre-integrated out-of-the-box with tools such as React Bootstrap, Redux, React Router, internationalization, and more.
- Serverless service backend – Amazon API Gateway powers the interface layer between the frontend and backend, and invokes serverless compute with AWS Lambda.
- Authentication - Amazon Cognito to allow the application to authenticate users and authorize access to the API layer. Note We will only use a single region for Amazon Cognito, as this serves as a reference implementation for authentication. In real-world deployment, this can be a social media authentication, eg: Amazon Cognito, Auth0, Facebook, Google etc.
Database components
- Product catalog/shopping cart - Amazon DynamoDB offers fast, predictable performance for the key-value lookups needed in the product catalog, as well as the shopping cart and order history. In this implementation, we have unique identifiers, titles, descriptions, quantities, locations, and price.
- Top sellers list - Amazon ElastiCache for Redis reads order information from Amazon DynamoDB Streams, creating a leaderboard of the “Top 20” purchased or rated books.
- Blog - Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In this implementation, it includes book information for Blog posts.
Infrastructure components
- Continuous deployment code pipeline – AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild help you build, test, and release your application code.
- Serverless web application – Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 provide a globally-distributed application.
- Health check and routing - AWS Route53 is used for DNS and allows us to perform health checks on our primary region, and upon detecting an issue, automatically switching to the secondary region using Route53 DNS updates.
This workshop is broken up into multiple modules. In each, we will walk through a high level overview of how to implement or test a part of this architecture.
Region Selection We have designed this workshop to use Ireland as the Primary Region and Singapore as Secondary Region. Please check before creating resources to ensure you are in the correct region:
- Primary Region :
eu-west-1(Ireland) - Secondary Region :
ap-southeast-1(Singapore)
- Prepare prerequisites
- Build a bookstore on Primary region
- Build a bookstore on Secondary region
- Configure Routing
- Test failover
- Cleaning Up
Important Note
In order to conduct this workshop you need an AWS Account with access to use IAM, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and API Gateway. The code and instructions in this workshop assume only one student is using a given AWS account at a time. If you try sharing an account with another student, you'll run into naming conflicts for certain resources - we do not recommend this as there may be unpredictable results or difficult to identify configuration issues. Also if your account already has 5 VPCs in Ireland and Singapore, you might experience to hit the default VPC limit of 5.
If your laptop's security policy blocks any 3rd party cookies (required by Cloud9), pair up with someone else who has a laptop which is not blocked. Please use Chrome or Firefox browsers.
To start the workshop you need the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). The front end application is written on Amplify and requires nodejs and npm. To avoid spending time on configuring your laptop, we will use AWS Cloud9 as our IDE. It has AWS CLI preconfigured. Follow the instruction here to launch a AWS Cloud9 IDE before we start the lab.
Start the lab: Prepare prerequisites