DAT309

How Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and Scopely

Improved Results and Reduced Costs
with a Serverless Architecture

Vlad Vlasceanu, Ganesh Subramaniam & Brandon Cuff

November 29, 2016
© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
What to Expect from the Session

• Overview of serverless architectures

• Serverless patterns in high performance data use cases
• Fulfillment by Amazon: Serverless stream processing
• Scopely: Serverless logging & hot key detection
What is a Serverless Architecture?

Build applications and services

What is a Serverless Architecture?

Build applications and services

… without managing infrastructure
What is a Serverless Architecture?

Build applications and services

… without managing infrastructure

• Function as a unit of scale

• Decrease complexity, abstracted
language runtime
• Run code when it’s needed
• Enable increased agility
Components of Serverless Architectures

AWS Lambda
Trigger-based Lambda functions
Components of Serverless Architectures

Streaming Data Data Persistence

Amazon Kinesis Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB Streams AWS Elasticsearch Service
Amazon S3

APIs
Amazon API Gateway
Integration Points
Amazon VPC resources
Event Sources AWS service APIs
Amazon CloudWatch 3rd party services
Amazon S3 AWS Lambda
AWS Config Trigger-based Lambda functions
Amazon SNS
Data Enablement

• Data is always part of the architecture

Data Enablement

• Data is always part of the architecture

• Data as a trigger for serverless processing

• Data as the object of serverless processing

• Data as the result of serverless processing

Data Processing Abstraction

• Lambda functions as event handlers:

one function per event type

• Lambda functions as serverless back ends:

one function per API / path

• Lambda functions for stream/data processing

one function per record or data type

Helps maintainability - hard to end up with monolithic/spaghetti code

Serverless High Performance Data Patterns
Active Role
• Processing data at scale
• Event-based invocation
• ETL orchestration
• On-demand processing
Advantages:
• Reduce operational complexities
• Operational cost optimization
Support Role
• Optimization of pre-existing
workloads and database utilization
• Management, monitoring
• Improved anomaly detection and
reaction
Advantages:
• Improved resilience
• Operational cost optimization
Serverless High Performance Data Patterns

FBA Seller Inventory Authority Serverless Logging &

Platform Hot Key Detection
 FBA Seller
Inventory Authority Platform
An Inventory Data Platform Using Serverless Architecture

Ganesh Subramaniam, Sr. Software Engineer, Amazon

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
How Does FBA Work?
1 Send
Inventory

6 Customer Returns 2 Receive & Store

5 Customer Service 3 Customer

Orders Product

4 Pick, Pack & Ship

Data Platform Goals

• Single source of truth for seller’s inventory

• Reconciled view of inventory

• Surface and track discrepancies

Design Requirements

• Should handle high volume of input messages (> 10000 tps)

• Should handle hot keys in input messages

• E.g., Received inventory message for a very large shipment

• Should handle duplicate and out of order input messages

• Must maintain an audit trail for every inventory quantity

change
 Seller Inventory Authority Platform
Redshift
S3 Analytics
Warehouse
Management
Systems
Inventory Transaction Service

Warehouse
Management
Systems Kinesis

Archivers Kinesis Firehose Kinesis Firehose

Inventory Query Service

AWS Lambda Archivers

Pre-receive Adjustment Transaction

processor processor processor Clients

Inbound DDB Streams Publisher Amazon

Records Elasticsearch

Inventory Events/ Clients

Notifications
Shipments Inventory Account DDB Streams A/C balance
Adjustment
transactions Balances Processor SNS Topics
Launch Results
• 22 dev weeks savings in operational costs across 11
fleets
• Design to launch < 4 months
• Improved the accuracy of inbound quantities between
5% to 10%
• Reduced cost of business operations (for example,
seller contacts)
• Developers in the team enjoyed using AWS managed
services
Best Practices that helped

• Container reuse
• Instrument, measure and monitor
• Abstract Launch scaffolding from entity processing
• Canary and Dashboards
Best Practices that helped

• Container reuse
• Instrument, measure and monitor
• Abstract Launch scaffolding from entity processing
• Canary and Dashboards
Metrics and Instrumentation

To mitigate the lack of debug/tracing capabilities with Lambda, we

placed significant emphasis in instrumenting our code to help
understand how the code was performing during runtime.

if (adjustmentManager.doesAdjustmentAlreadyExist(metrics, adjustment)) {
// this adjustment already exists in our store. Nothing further needs to be done.
metrics.addCount(METRIC_IDEMPOTENT_CHECK_FAILED, 1, Unit.ONE);
log.debug("Adjustment already exists in DB. " + adjustment);
return null;
}
metrics.addCount(adjustment.getType().name(), 1, Unit.ONE);
metrics.addCount(String.join("#", adjustment.getSource().name(),
adjustment.getType().name()), 1, Unit.ONE);
Best Practices that helped

• Container reuse
• Instrument, measure and monitor
• Abstract Launch scaffolding from entity processing
• Canary and Dashboards
LambdaLaunchHelper

 Invokes the appropriate event handler with the metrics instance and the
input
 Event Handler is responsible for the deserialization of the items in the
request payload and invokes the Entity processor with the metrics instance
and the deserialized entity.
 Common error/fault handling – writing to S3 and skipping the individual
entity at fault or fail the entire batch.
 Common metrics
• Batch Size
• Total Time to process the batch
• Time to process an individual entity
• Entity Count in the batch
• Fault Count
Best Practices that helped

• Container reuse
• Instrument, measure and monitor
• Abstract Launch scaffolding from entity processing
• Canary and Dashboards
Canary and Availability of Pipeline

• Regular submission of synthetic transactions and events

to the pipeline to monitor the health of the pipeline.
• Use different keys to ensure that we monitor the various
shards at random
• Also helps us monitor to ensure we are within SLA for end to
end processing time
• Use Kinesis shard-level metrics to identify any potential
backlog or issues in the stream processing pipeline.
Dashboard and Monitoring

Average Transaction Processing Time Oldest Transaction Age Canary Processing Time
 Serverless Logging &
Hot Key Detection
Brandon Cuff, Sr. Software Engineer, Scopely

© 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Scopely’s Mobile Games

6+ million daily active users

1 million requests per minute
100+ API servers (c3.2xlarge)
Scopely’s Game Server Architecture
Amazon DynamoDB Partitioning
Our Hot Key Problem

What are hot keys?

• Heavily requested keys/objects
localized on a single
partition/shard/node
• Subject to capacity of that single
partition/shard/node

Amazon DynamoDB table

symptoms:
• Total consumed capacity is less
than provisioned capacity
• And experiencing throttle events
Our Hot Key Detection Process

Application uses Count Min Sketch to track top 10 keys then logs them
periodically (once per minute)
memcached-get-count topkey[1]: key=3.user.41401542 count=354 totalCount=68912 frequency=.00514

Count Min Sketch

• Probabilistic algorithm
• Fixed size of memory to track unlimited operations
• Small chance of a error
Architecture Overview
Hot Key Event

Lambda will take our log message and convert it into an Elasticsearch
document
memcached-get-count topkey[1]: key=3.user.41401542 count=354 totalCount=68912 frequency=.00514

{
...
"topkey_category": "memcached-get-count",
"topkey_key": "3.user.41401542",
"topkey_count": 354,
"topkey_totalCount": 68912,
"topkey_frequency": .00514
}
Kibana Dashboard
Results & Lessons Learned
We Had More Bugs Than We Thought We Did!

Special case user ids ElastiCache Memcached Nodes

Key: “user.-1”

Configuration objects with a single

key retrieved on every request
Key: “dice-game-settings”

Didn’t notice because it wasn’t

causing problems (yet...).
One node is sending out much more
data than the rest
Large Keys Are Also a Problem

We can look for unusually large keys if we increment by the size of objects
rather than 1
memcached-get-count topkey[1]: key=3.Dice.inv.21645428 size=20354 totalCount=1008912 frequency=.0203

You can get the total bandwidth consumed by a specific key by summing the
events over a time period.
We Caught Some Bots and Spammers

Initially shut bad users down

by deleting accounts.

Later implemented per-user

request rate limiting via
Memcached counters
Discovered Poor Client Behavior

• Hot keys were discovered on

several users

• Filtering by client platform revealed

that they were all from Android

• Android client made a request for

every game in the game list which
was huge for some small number
of users (making their user ids hot
keys)
brandon@scopely.com

github.com/bcuff
Thank you!
Remember to complete
your evaluations!
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