December 2019 Summaries

The logistics of the digital world have become increasingly complex, requiring modern content management and delivery systems that can scale with demand and adapt to changing needs. Infrastructure plays a critical role in managing customer experiences at scale, with considerations including scalability, flexibility, and trustworthiness. Providers must be able to offer low latency, high uptimes, and excellent reliability, as well as proactive support and security features such as two-factor authentication and compliance certifications. By offloading infrastructure concerns to a trusted provider, businesses can focus on building great digital experiences and mitigate the risk of outages and downtime.

The author, an infrastructure engineer at Contentful, recounts the story of how they implemented multi-region active-active file delivery on Amazon S3 using CloudFront and Lambda@Edge. The goal was to increase availability by serving files from multiple regions, but this introduced new risks, such as the possibility of causing an outage themselves. To mitigate these risks, the team created a production readiness criteria list, which outlined requirements for monitoring, deployment, scaling, and other aspects of the system. They also used TypeScript to write more reliable code and deployed the platform using automated tools. By addressing their engineering gut feelings and operational experience, they were able to build a reliable software platform that increased availability while minimizing risks. The implementation demonstrates the challenges and trade-offs of edge computing and the importance of careful planning and risk management in cloud infrastructure deployments.