AWS App Mesh—Service Mesh for Microservices Running on AWS

When AWS Autoscale Doesn’t

The premise behind autoscaling in AWS is simple: you can maximize your ability to handle load spikes and minimize costs if you automatically scale your application out based on metrics like CPU or memory utilization. If you need 100 Docker containers to support your load during the day but only 10 when load is lower at night, running 100 containers at all times means that you’re using 900% more capacity than you need every night. With a constant container count, you’re either spending more money than you need to most of the time or your service will likely fall over during a load spike.

The Guardian’s Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

Packets-per-second limits in EC2

While evaluating the performance of a server application, we eventually (and hopefully) run up against the most fundamental constraining factor: the network. Cloud providers tend to offer somewhat handwavy guidance on networking constraints, especially when compared to the exhaustive literature explaining the quotas for RAM, CPU, and I/O. While working on an unrelated stress test in EC2, we were surprised by some results that led us down the path of investigating EC2 network capacity claims, resulting in this writeup. EC2 documentation describes network performance in terms of maximum available bandwidth.