Amazon

Acquia Cloud Next, a journey in platform modernization

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 02:11:59 -0500

Acquia Cloud was first launched in 2009 as Acquia Hosting. Acquia was one of the earliest adopters of AWS. At the time, AWS had only 3 services: EC2 , S3, and SimpleDB.

A lot has changed since 2009, which led us to re-architect Acquia Cloud starting in late 2019. This effort, labeled "Acquia Cloud Next" (ACN), became the largest technology overhaul in Acquia's history.

In 2013, four years after the launch of Acquia Cloud, Docker emerged. Docker popularized a lightweight container runtime, and a simple way to package, distribute and deploy applications.

Docker was built on a variety of Linux kernel developments, including "cgroups", "user namespaces" and "Linux containers":

In 2006, Paul Menage (Google) contributed generic process containers to the Linux kernel, which was later renamed control groups, or cgroups.
In 2008, Eric W. Biederman (Red Hat) introduced user namespaces. User namespaces allow a Linux process to have its own set of users, and in particular, allow root privileges inside process containers.
In 2008, IBM created the Linux Containers Project (LCP), a set of tools on top of cgroups and user namespaces.

Docker's focus was to deploy containers on a single machine. When organizations started to adopt Docker across a large number of machines, the need for a "container orchestrator" became clear.

Long before Docker was born, in the early 2000s, Google famously built its search engine on commodity hardware. Where competitors used expensive enterprise-grade hardware, Google realized that they could scale faster on cheap hardware running Linux. This worked as long as their software was able to cope with hardware failures. The key to building fault-tolerant software was the use of containers. To do so, Google not only contributed to the development of cgroups and user namespaces, but they also built an in-house, proprietary container orchestrator called Borg.

When Docker exploded in popularity, engineers involved in the Borg project branched off to develop Kubernetes. Google open sourced Kubernetes in 2014, and in the years following, Kubernetes grew to become the leading container management system in the world.

Back to Acquia. By the end of 2019, Acquia Cloud's infrastructure was delivering around 35 billion page views a month (excluding CDN). Our infrastructure had grown to tens of thousands of EC2 instances spread across many AWS regions. We supported some of the highest trafficked events in the world, including coverage of the Olympics, the Australian Open, Weather.com, the Mueller report, and more.

Throughout 2019, we rolled out many "under the hood" improvements to Acquia Cloud. Thanks to these, our customers' sites saw performance improvements anywhere from 30% to 60%, at no cost to them.

That said, it became harder and harder to make improvements to the existing platform. Because of our scale, it could take weeks to roll out improvements to our fleet of EC2 instances. It was around that time that we set out to re-architect Acquia Cloud from scratch.

Acquia's journey to ACN started prior to Kubernetes and Docker becoming mainstream. Our initial approach was based on cgroups and Linux containers. But as Kubernetes and Docker established themselves in the market, it became clear we had to pivot. We decided to design ACN from the ground up to be a cloud-native, Kubernetes-native platform.

In March of 2021, after a year and a half of development, my little blog, dri.es, was the first site to move to ACN. Getting my site live in production was a fun rallying point for our team. Even more so because my site was also the first site to launch on the original Acquia Hosting platform.

I never blogged about ACN because I wanted to wait until enough customer sites had upgraded. Fast forward another year and a half, and a large number of customers are running on ACN. We now have some of our highest traffic customers running on ACN. I can say without a doubt that ACN offers the highest levels of performance, self-healing, and dynamic scaling that Acquia customers have relied on.

ACN continuously monitors application performance, detects failures, reroutes traffic, and scales websites automatically without human assistance. ACN can handle billions of pageviews, gracefully deals with massive traffic spikes, all without manual intervention or architectural changes. Best of all, we can roll out new features in minutes or hours instead of weeks.

There is no better way to visualize this than by sharing a chart:

The "web transaction times" of a large Fortune 2000 customer that upgraded their main website to Acquia Cloud Next. You can see that PHP (blue area), MySQL (dark yellow area) and Memcached (light yellow) became both much faster and less volatile after migrating to Acquia Cloud Next. (The graph is generated by New Relic. New Relic defines the "web transaction time" as the time between when the application receives a HTTP request and when a HTTP response is sent.)

Customers on Acquia Cloud Next get:

Much faster page performance and web transaction times (see chart above)
5x faster databases compared to traditional MySQL server deployments
Faster dynamic auto-scaling and faster self-healing
Improved resource isolation - Nginx, Memcached, Cron, and other services all run in dedicated pods

To achieve these results, we worked closely with our partner, AWS. We pushed the boundaries of certain AWS services, including Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Amazon Aurora. For example, AWS had to make changes to EKS to ensure that they could meet the scale at which we were growing. After 15 years of working with AWS, we continue to be impressed by AWS' willingness to partner with us and keep up with our demand.

In the process, AWS made upstream Kubernetes contributions to overcome some of our scaling challenges. These helped improve the speed and stability of Kubernetes. We certainly like that AWS shares our values and commitments to Open Source.

Last but not least, I'd be remiss not to give a big shoutout to Acquia's product, architect, and engineering teams. Re-architecting a platform with tens of thousands of EC2 instances running large-scale, mission-critical websites is no small feat.

Our team continued to find creative and state-of-the-art ways to build the best possible platform for Drupal. For a glimpse of that, take a look at this presentation we gave at Kubecon 2022. We learned that by switching our scaling metric from Kubernetes' built-in CPU utilization to a custom metric, we could reduce the churn on our clusters by ~1,000%.

Looking back at ACN's journey over the past 3+ years, I'm incredibly proud of how far we have come.

Relentlessly eliminating barriers to growth

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 22:11:59 -0500

In my last blog post, I shared that when Acquia was a small startup, we were simultaneously focused on finding product-market fit and eliminating barriers to future growth.

In that light, I loved reading Eugene Wie's blog post called, Invisible asymptotes. Wie was a product leader at Amazon. In his blog post he explains how Amazon looks far into the future, identifies blockers for long-term growth, and turns eliminating these growth barriers into multi-decade efforts. As Amazon shows, eliminating barriers to growth remains very important long after you have outgrown the startup phase.

For example, Amazon considered shipping costs to be a growth blocker, or as Wie describes it, an invisible asymptote for growth. People hate paying for shipping costs, so Amazon decided to get rid of them. At first, solving this looked prohibitively expensive. How can you offer free shipping to millions of customers? Solving for this limitation became a multi-year effort. First, Amazon tried to appease customers' distaste for shipping fees with "Super Saver Shipping". Amazon introduced Super Saver Shipping in January 2002 for orders over $99. If you placed an order of $99 or more, you received free shipping. In the span of a few months, that number dropped to $49 and then to $25. Eventually this led to the launch of Amazon Prime in 2005, making all shipping "free". Members pay $79 per year for free, unlimited two-day shipping on eligible purchases. While a program like Amazon Prime doesn't actually make shipping free, it feels free to the customer, which effectively eliminates the barrier for growth. The impact on Amazon's growth was tremendous. Today, Amazon Prime provides Amazon an economic moat, or a sustainable competitive advantage – it isn't easy for other retailers to compete from a sheer economic and logistical standpoint.

Another obstacle for Amazon's growth was shipping times. People don't like having to wait for days to receive their Amazon purchase. Several years ago, I was talking to Werner Vogels, Amazon's global CTO, and asked him where most commerce investments were going. He responded that reducing shipping times was more strategic than making improvements to the commerce backend or website. As Wie points out in his blog, Amazon has been working on reducing shipping times for over a decade. First by building a higher density network of distribution centers, and more recently through delivery from local Whole Foods stores, self-service lockers at Whole Foods, predictive or anticipatory shipping, drone delivery, and more. Slowly, but certainly, Amazon is building out its own end-to-end delivery network with one primary objective: reducing shipping times.

Every organization has limitations that stunt long-term growth so there are important lessons that can be learned from how Amazon approached its blockers or invisible asymptotes:

Take the time to correctly identify your long-term blockers for growth.
Removing these long-term blockers for growth may look impossible at first.
Removing these long-term blockers requires creativity, innovation, patience, persistence and aggressive capital allocation. It can take many initiatives and many years to eliminate them.
Overcoming these obstacles can be a powerful strategy that can unlock unbelievable growth.

I spend a lot of time and effort working on eliminating Drupal's and Acquia's growth barriers so I love these kind of lessons. In a future blog post, I'll share my thoughts about Drupal's growth blockers.

How Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub impacts the cloud wars

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 11:16:38 -0400

Today, Microsoft announced it is buying GitHub in a deal that will be worth $7.5 billion. GitHub hosts 80 million source code repositories, and is used by almost 30 million software developers around the world. It is one of the most important tools used by software organizations today.

As the leading cloud infrastructure platforms – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc – mature, they will likely become functionally equivalent for the vast majority of use cases. In the future, it won't really matter whether you use Amazon, Google or Microsoft to deploy most applications. When that happens, platform differentiators will shift from functional capabilities, such as multi-region databases or serverless application support, to an increased emphasis on ease of use, the out-of-the-box experience, price, and performance.

Given multiple functionally equivalent cloud platforms at roughly the same price, the simplest one will win. Therefore, ease of use and out-of-the-box experience will become significant differentiators.

This is where Microsoft's GitHub acquisition comes in. Microsoft will most likely integrate its cloud services with GitHub; each code repository will get a button to easily test, deploy, and run the project in Microsoft's cloud. A deep and seamless integration between Microsoft Azure and GitHub could result in Microsoft's cloud being perceived as simpler to use. And when there are no other critical differentiators, ease of use drives adoption.

If you ask me, Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, made a genius move by buying GitHub. It could take another ten years for the cloud wars to mature, and for us to realize just how valuable this acquisition was. In a decade, $7.5 billion could look like peanuts.

While I trust that Microsoft will be a good steward of GitHub, I personally would have preferred to see GitHub remain independent. I suspect that Amazon and Google will now accelerate the development of their own versions of GitHub. A single, independent GitHub would have maximized collaboration among software projects and developers, especially those that are Open Source. Having a variety of competing GitHubs will most likely introduce some friction.

Over the years, I had a few interactions with GitHub's co-founder, Chris Wanstrath. He must be happy with this acquisition as well; it provides stability and direction for GitHub, ends a 9-month CEO search, and is a great outcome for employees and investors. Chris, I want to say congratulations on building the world's biggest software collaboration platform, and thank you for giving millions of Open Source developers free tools along the way.

Unlike marketing efforts, CAPEX doesn't lie

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 04:23:51 -0400

The title of this blog post comes from a recent Platformonomics article that analyzes how much Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are investing in their cloud infrastructure. It does that analysis based on these companies' publicly reported CAPEX numbers.

Capital expenditures, or CAPEX, is money used to purchase, upgrade, improve, or extend the life of long-term assets. Capital expenditures generally takes two forms: maintenance expenditure (money spent for normal upkeep and maintenance) and expansion expenditures (money used to buy assets to grow the business, or money used to buy assets to actually sell). This could include buying a building, upgrading computers, acquiring a business, or in the case of cloud infrastructure vendors, buying the hardware needed to invest in the growth of their cloud infrastructure.

Building this analysis on CAPEX spending is far from perfect, as it includes investments that are not directly related to scaling cloud infrastructure. For example, Google is building subsea cables to improve their internet speed, and Amazon is investing a lot in its package and shipping operations, including the build-out of its own cargo airline. These investments don't advance their cloud services businesses. Despite these inaccuracies, CAPEX is still a useful indicator for measuring the growth of their cloud infrastructure businesses, simply because these investments dwarf others.

The Platformonomics analysis prompted me to do a bit of research on my own.

The graph above shows the trailing twelve months (TTM) CAPEX spending for each of the five cloud vendors. CAPEX don't lie: cloud infrastructure services is clearly a three-player race. There are only three cloud infrastructure companies that are really growing: Amazon, Google (Alphabet) and Microsoft. Oracle and IBM are far behind and their spending is not enough to keep pace with Amazon, Microsoft or Google.

Amazon's growth in CAPEX is the most impressive. This becomes really clear when you look at the percentage growth:

Amazon's CAPEX has exploded over the past 10 years. In relative terms, it has grown more than all other companies' CAPEX combined.

The scale is hard to grasp

To put the significance of these investments in cloud services in perspective, in the last 12 months, Amazon and Alphabet's CAPEX is almost 10x the size of Coca-Cola's, a company whose products are available in every grocery store, gas station, and vending machine in every town and country in the world. More than 3% of all beverages consumed around the world are Coca-Cola products. In contrast, the amount of money cloud infrastructure vendors are investing in CAPEX is hard to grasp.

Disclaimers: As a public market investor, I'm long Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Also, Amazon is an investor in my company, Acquia.

Cooking with Alexa and Drupal

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 13:51:46 -0500

When I'm home, one of the devices I use most frequently is the Amazon Echo. I use it to play music, check the weather, set timers, check traffic, and more. It's a gadget that is beginning to inform many of my daily habits.

Discovering how organizations can use a device like the Amazon Echo is big part of my professional life too. For the past two years, Acquia Labs has been helping customers take advantage of conversational interfaces, beacons and augmented reality to remove friction from user experiences. One of the most exciting examples of this was the development of Ask GeorgiaGov, an Alexa skill that enables Georgia state residents to use an Amazon Echo to easily interact with government agencies.

The demo video below shows another example. It features a shopper named Alex, who has just returned from Freshland Market (a fictional grocery store). After selecting a salmon recipe from Freshland Market's website, Alex has all the ingredients she needs to get started. Alex begins by asking Alexa how to make her preferred salmon recipe for eight people. The recipe on Freshland Market's Drupal website is for four people, so the Freshland Market Alexa skill automatically adjusts the number of ingredients needed to accommodate eight people. By simply asking Alexa a series of questions, Alex is able to preheat the oven, make ingredient substitutions and complete the recipe without ever looking at her phone or laptop. With Alexa, Alex is able to stay focused on the joy of cooking, instead of following a complex recipe.

This project was easy to implement because the team took advantage of the Alexa integration module, which allows Drupal to respond to Alexa skill requests. Originally created by Jakub Suchy (Acquia) and maintained by Chris Hamper (Acquia), the Alexa integration module enables Drupal to respond to custom voice commands, otherwise known as "skills".

Once an Amazon Echo user provides a verbal query, known as an "utterance", this vocal input is converted into a text-based request (the "intent") that is sent to the Freshland Market website (the "endpoint"). From there, a combination of custom code and the Alexa module for Drupal 8 responds to the Amazon Echo with the requested information.

Over the past year, it's been very exciting to see the Acquia Labs team build a connected customer journey using chatbots, augmented reality and now, voice assistance. It's a great example of how organizations can build cross-channel customer experiences that take place both online and offline, in store and at home, and across multiple touch points. While Freshland Market is a fictional store, any organization could begin creating these user experiences today.

Special thanks to Chris Hamper and Preston So for building the Freshland Market Alexa skill, and thank you to Ash Heath and Drew Robertson for producing the demo videos.

Amazon invests in Acquia

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 11:46:58 -0400

I'm happy to share news that Amazon has joined the Acquia family as our newest investor. This investment builds on the recent $50 million financing round that Acquia completed in May, which was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

Acquia is the largest provider of Drupal infrastructure in the world. We run on more than 8,000 AWS instances and serve more than 27 billion hits a month or 333 TB of bandwidth a month. Working with AWS has been an invaluable part of our success story, and today's investment will further solidify our collaboration.

We did not disclose the amount of the investment in today's news announcement.

MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:20:00 -0400

Funny anecdote: I was waiting backstage to go on stage for my TR35 elevator pitch on Drupal at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference, scheduled to be directly after Craig Mundie's keynote presentation. (Craig is one of the two people that replace Bill Gates now he is retired.) When he walked off the stage, he stopped and jokingly said "Good luck, I warmed up the audience for you.". He probably didn't know that I was going to talk about Open Source software. ;-)

Either way, it is a great testament for all of us who work on Drupal that MIT recognizes Drupal as an important emerging technology, and that we are now on the radar of even more great technology leaders. Rock on!

From left to right: Dan Farber (Editor in Chief, CNET), David P. Anderson (Professor, University of Berkeley, SETI@home), Matthew Glotzbach (Product Management Director, Google), Parker Harris (Executive Vice President Technology, Salesforce.com), Mendel Rosenblum, (Chief Scientist and Cofounder, VMware), and Werner Vogels (Chief Technology Officer, Amazon).

From left to right: Erika Jonietz (Senior Editor, Technology Review), Elizabeth Altman (Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Motorola Mobile Devices), Kevin Lynch (Chief Technology Officer, Adobe Systems), Masaaki Maeda (President and CEO, DoCoMo), and Rich Miner (Group Manager, Mobile Platforms and Android, Google).

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Drupal Pro book cracks Amazon Top 100

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:23:50 -0400

About a week ago the new Pro Drupal Development book started shipping, and today, the book cracked the Amazon Top 100. And we're not talking about the top 100 computer books here, we're talking about the top 100 bestsellers.

I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive, and rumor has it that Apress, the publisher, already started making arrangements for a reprint.

That ranking might be short-lived but still ... can someone tell me what is going on here, because this is just plain nuts. I didn't expect that to happen either ...