OpsForDevs

devops bootcamp material that I have taught at previous companies

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Exercise 8: Implementing Scalability and High Availability

Objective

Enhance your cloud deployment from Exercise 6 by implementing load balancing, auto-scaling, and improving high availability.

Prerequisites

• Completed Exercise 6 (Cloud Deployment)
• Understanding of load balancing and auto-scaling concepts

Instructions

1. Implement Load Balancing
   • Choose a load balancing solution (e.g., cloud provider’s load balancer, Nginx, HAProxy)
   • Configure the load balancer to distribute traffic across your application instances
   • Ensure your application is stateless or implement session persistence if necessary
2. Set Up Auto-Scaling
   • Configure auto-scaling for your application instances
   • Define scaling policies based on metrics like CPU usage or request count
   • Test your auto-scaling configuration by simulating high load
3. Enhance High Availability
   • Deploy your application across multiple availability zones
   • Implement a database replication strategy for your managed database
   • Set up automated failover for your database
4. Update Your Infrastructure as Code
   • Modify your Terraform templates to include the new load balancing and auto-scaling configurations
   • Ensure your IaC templates are creating a multi-AZ deployment
5. Test Scalability and High Availability
   • Perform load testing to verify that your application scales correctly
   • Simulate failure scenarios (e.g., instance failure, AZ outage) to test high availability
6. Document Your Architecture
   • Create a detailed architecture diagram showing your scalable and highly available setup
   • Document your load balancing and auto-scaling configurations

Bonus Tasks

1. Implement a content delivery network (CDN) for static assets
2. Set up database read replicas to improve read performance
3. Implement a caching layer (e.g., Redis, Memcached) to reduce database load

Deliverables

1. Updated Terraform templates including load balancing and auto-scaling configurations
2. Load testing results demonstrating scalability
3. Documentation of your high availability setup, including failover strategies
4. Architecture diagram of your scalable and highly available system

Remember, the goal is to create a system that can handle varying loads and remain available even in the face of component failures.