How to build a multi-region highly available active-active architecture

This self-paced workshop takes to step by step Building Multi-Region Active-Active (and Active-Passive) solution with morden architecture and polyglot persistent databases. The web application is a Bookstore, and it can be used as a reference architecture for highly available ecommerce store.

Key points on implementation:

• Multi-region Active – Active (Active – Passive) Architecture
• Modern Web Application using Amplify and ReactJS
• Modern Application architecture using Serverless and Container
• Polyglot Persistence database architecture with DynamoDB and Aurora MySQL

Architecture Overview

The architeure includes the following flow:

1. An Wordpress layer for the book blog posts, using AWS Fargate and Aurora MySQL. (Module 1-1)
2. 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. (Module 1-2)
3. Build the same Wordpress layer in the secondary region. (Module 2-1)
4. Configure the replication across the regions for Aurora MySQL, S3, and DynamoDB. (Module 2-2)
5. Deploy the same UI and API layer in Singare. (Module 2-3)
6. Configure API gateway Custom Domain Name and Route53 Health Check for the failover testing. (Module 3)

For the purposes of this workshop, our failover is focused on the path from our application through API Gateway.

Implementation Instructions

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.

Recorded Video walk-through of the labs

Lab 1-1a

Lab 1b-2

Lab 2

Lab 3

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)

Modules

0. Prepare prerequisites
1. Build a bookstore on Primary region
2. Build a bookstore on Secondary region
3. Configure Routing
4. Test failover
5. Cleaning Up

Important Note

In order to conduct this workshop you need,

1. your own laptop (not a tablet) with Chrome or Firefox browsers. You corporate laptop may have a problem accessing domain .xyz.
2. an AWS Account with access to use IAM, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and API Gateway The 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.
3. AWS Account: Also if you use the corporate account, you might have permission (IAM) or SCP problems. We need Administrator access for the workshop. Please create a new AWS account with IAM Administrator access.
4. VPC: Also if your corporate account already has 5 VPCs in Ireland and Singapore, you might experience to hit the default VPC limit of 5.
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.

To start the workshop you need the AWS Command Line Interface(CLI). The front end application uses 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 you start the lab. Cloud9 will be deployed in a VPC in Ireland. If you don't have any VPC (including the default VPC), please create a default VPC using the VPC console in Ireland.

Let's start!

Start the lab: Prepare prerequisites