Why Loggly Chose AWS Route 53 Over Elastic Load Balancing | Hacker News Reader

Why Loggly Chose AWS Route 53 Over Elastic Load Balancing

loggly.com

77 pointsjtblin48 comments

Former Loggly employee here. Loggly is at CTO #3 or 4 in about 3 years. The CEO, marketing guy with black turtle neck, "runs" engineering. It is NOT an engineering company and they are on their way to outsourcing all development to India.

Formally they had all of their EC2 instances configured to run without swap and didn't use EBS such that instances would crash 1-3 times a day and lose all data which would require 1-2 day customer restores of data.

Additionally, this Java shop oversubscribed threads on every Solr box which made them restart each Solr instance every hour. To think any revolutionary engineering ideas come from an former Apple marketing wannabee who puts outsourced Indian engineering in place as yes men is a huge stretch.

Let's be honest, Loggly is in huge trouble and can't hire quality engineering talent and as a result is trying to remarket themselves as an engineering driven company as they outsource to India.

Key question isn't..do you use DNS or Elastic Load Balance...it is...what is your VOLUNTARY RATE OF ATTRITION? Hint, really bad!

I interviewed there for a devops/sys admin role and ran far away after that process when I learned about what is going on and problems the ops group has to solve.

Then reading this fluff piece made me glad I never even thought about working there after that phone interview. Whoever claims a DNS round robin is a good way to handle fail over doesn't really know what they are talking about. I have dug into the how something like rsyslog handles a dns request. My guess is it just passes it off to the OS.

But what I got from this is loggly is ok with losing customer data

could you expand on what made you run away? i.e. what sort of problems which are tasked upon the ops group would make an ops person run away?

This is unrelated to the loggly bit, it would just be interesting to know for a non-ops-guy.

DevOps here. What was the red flag? (Curious for the next time I'm interviewing)

I'm disappointed this is the top rated comment. Your repeated bigotry towards "outsourced Indian engineering" combined with using a throwaway detract from what appears to be potentially useful information (Loggly CTO changes, running without EBS and without swap, etc.). Can someone else corroborate the factual bits without the xenophobia?

Outsourced teams anywhere generally don't get much ownership of the product. What results is a bare minimum meet-the-specs effort, which is understandable but generally results in a crappy product.

This is a reflection of the social and communication issues in typical outsourcing setups, not a reflection of the talent of the outsourced team.

Serious question: Are people upvoting this to poke fun like some kind of daily wtf?

A logging platform that lists 1 of their 2 major requirements as "To not drop any data, ever" is using round robin DNS for fault tolerance? I can't see too many people on HN upvoting this for being insightful or impressive.

Edit: I just can't help myself. How are you going to send syslog when any server fails and not "drop any data, ever"? Even over TCP the in transit messages are lost when the connection is broken. So like, their business is basically syslog and they don't know that?

I upvoted it in the hopes that someone would provide the missing piece. Like "oh, we forgot to mention that the DNS is pointing to our own haproxy servers that all have redundant power/network/whatever) or something.

Loggly seems to be all about running In The Cloud, so that seems unlikely.

EC2 instances running haproxy would mitigate a number of the problems they discussed with using ELBs but the inability to use VIPs (with vrrp or ucarp) in AWS means that a failure will always boil down to the same pattern: a key front end instance dies, client traffic keeps being directed to it for 5 minutes (at best), and that's life.

The only way for them to fix this would be to have their own client that would attempt retries while caching unacked logs locally, but they market not needing a client (only syslog) as the benefit.

TL;DR Loggly can't promise no data lose in its current incarnation.

> If there is an issue with a collector, Route 53 automatically takes it out of the service; our customers won’t see any impact.

Except when for example rsyslog caches DNS resolution forever. Or the log forwarded doesn't have a buffer and logs get lost.

How does this work regardless? Isn't route53 a DNS system? How does it know whether a service went up/down?

EDIT: To reply to myself http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/hea... http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_C...

Unfortunately inside of AWS there is no other solution than to rely on DNS to update the list of IP that resolve from an address (even ELB does that). Route53 has health-checks that can update the list automatically. Uptime is entirely dependent on the TTL of those records and if the clients respects that TTL.

Complementary to that it's also possible to assign reserved IPs to machines so that at least the set of IP is always the same even if the hosts get rotated. Assigning IPs to hosts is not instantaneous either and depends on an API call. Also IPs are tied to a specific region.

In a real datacenter other options are possible like sharing IP addresses between multiple devices and having lower-latency failover. These aren't perfect either and have different failure scenarios.

Yeah I don't get their approach. There is no way this will cause 100% delivery if one server fails within that rotation.

That chances of failure go up dramatically if 2+ hosts behind round robin fail, etc.

Not to mention once hosts resolve this to an IP they will re-use the route. This approach is not balanced.

I don't want to be /that/ guy but if they can't scale with ELB they should invest in a dedicated load balancer infrastructure that can offload requests to their cloud instances.

This is a really bizarre post.

I am more worried about the DNS caching issue.

The 2+ hosts failing should not be much of a problem if you have a separate health checker host which does nothing except gathering heart-beats from all the hosts in your fleet and updating the DNS periodically.

That's exactly why it's a problem.

If you have 3 hosts and 2 of them go down, in this setup there is more than 50% chance that cached hosts will be trying to connect to a non-existing server.

Also expecting client to perform a DNS lookup every time there is an outgoing log packet is pretty shitty for performance. You can't guarantee near instant DNS server availability for every client.

not to mention people that use something like a local caching daemon like nscd might cache a bad ip for a whole day

Honestly it sounds like they just need a high performance L3 load balancer, rather than ELB. As you said though, just because AWS doesn't give them that doesn't mean the slot up was Route53 instead of say haproxy.

Lots of other comments have torn this article apart (and justifiably so), but I still feel the need to pile on.

In their docs, Loggly only gives out one API endpoint: logs-01.loggly.com.

It is referenced as the endpoint for HTTP, HTTPS, syslog and syslog TLS. These seem to be the only methods available to send log data to them.

There is the obvious problem that a DNS record with a 60s TTL cannot possibly receive every single packet sent to it in the event of a server failure. Even if the returned IP address is an elastic IP, it takes a substantial amount of time to move to another instance in AWS.

I don't know why you would use the same service hostname for all of these endpoints. Separate names for each endpoint, even if they all pointed to the same pool of hosts, would at least give some flexibility in the future when they have enough traffic to get desperate about capacity. I would also think they might want to segregate native syslog from HTTP traffic, since I presume it uses different processes on the backend.

It's also curious that they chose to return only one A record. DNS RR is a poor substitute for real load balancing, but it's better than nothing. With multiple A records, there is at least a chance that some of their traffic will go to other servers -- rather than all of it potentially going to one as it is now.

While they made no claims about using Route 53 for its geo DNS capabilities, I still found it amusing that I was sent to a US East IP from California. Not that it's super critical that my log lines get delivered quickly, but it is ideal to shorten the path of an insecure and unreliable transport in order to improve durability. Although I would never ship syslog out to some host on the Internet, a host 16 hops away is even more ludicrous.

I think their article says a lot more about how poorly ELBs function when you exceed the low traffic threshold it is seemingly designed for than about how well Route 53 works (and it is a decent static DNS service). The inability to robustly direct incoming traffic is the achilles heel of AWS.

There is a rather large technical divide between 'no logs left behind' and relying on DNS lookup to provide that guarantee.

I was thinking the exact same thing while reading this - it reads like a company that doesn't understand the unique challenges involved with distributed computing.

I'm actually in the middle of deciding between Loggly, Papertrail, and Logentries for centralized log management. I guess that cuts it down to two.

This is primitive. It seems like they are on the verge of discovering BGP, which could be used to provide scalability, load balancing, and clean failover without DNS caching issues.

Why would you allow your clients to transmit potentially sensitive data to you as clear text over the internet?

As far as I can tell they use Route 53 to identify targets.

The transmission type is still up to the client/receiver.

I'm sure it's because rsyslog supports it (many mentions in the article to staying compliant with rsyslog).

Thats what I don't get, how is it responsible to stay compliant when that means insecure?

You can use rsyslog with TLS http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_tls.html

What are some alternatives to Loggly? I really like being able to aggregate my logs with minimal setup (and cost). I'm logging with Logback (Java), and there is a convenient extension that forwards log statements to Loggly.

There are definitely some like Logentries or Sumologic. But the best I have seen so far is logmatic.io - to be honest I am working for them :). Our objective is to get one tool for all by allying the power of search with true business intelligence. Here is a video of our product as it was 6 months ago: http://bit.ly/logsjava. We are still in private beta and our prices are similar to Loggly and we already have tens of customers.

We just finished writing a syslog4j-derived Logback appender with support for UDP, TCP with TLS encryption, and cleartext TCP:

Background and setup: http://help.papertrailapp.com/kb/configuration/java-logback-...

GitHub repo: https://github.com/papertrail/logback-syslog4j

Papertrail also works with the standard Logback SyslogAppender.

Does the syslog appender handle large, multi-line log messages (i.e. messages containing stack traces)?

I recall having some trouble with that when using syslog with Loggly, before switching over to the json appender.

Short answer: it depends.

Long answer: logback and both appenders can accept pattern formats to adjust how they're formatted. How useful the end result is depends a lot on the receiver, though, and more than that, there's no one implementation that's great for everyone -- that is, there's no right way to "handle large, multi-line log messages," only attempts at making them more useful.

An easy example is searching. Some people want to see the entire message, others want only the matching portion of a stack trace, others want some combination, and others - probably most people - just want something that's useful, however the actual UX works.

In Papertrail's case, our sender-specific context links (think grep -A/-B/-C) were designed for navigating multiline output from a single sender: https://papertrailapp.com/tour/viewer/context. It's basically pivoting from a single entry in a stack trace to the entire stack trace.

My main concern isn't formatting or searching, but truncation, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2011986/does-syslog-reall....

Have a look at Scalyr: https://www.scalyr.com

The setup is straightforward [0], and you'll find that the plans are very competitive.

[0] https://www.scalyr.com/help/install-agent

(Full disclosure: I work with them.)

Hi ejain, check out this post by Takipi, the 7 log management tools you need to know: http://www.takipiblog.com/the-7-log-management-tools-you-nee...

Interesting points. Here is a few things you'll miss choosing Route 53 over ELB:

* HTTPS termination.

* Autoscaling group management. By connecting an ELB to an autoscaling group, the logic of registration and deregistration is fully managed behind the scenes. With route53, you have to implement it yourself.

* Minimum autoscaling group size. If you enable ELB health checks, you can rely on the ELB to maintain a group of instances of constant size.

Is https termination really worth mentioning? They'll still be running some type of web server (nginx, apache, whatever) and enabling https termination there is probably easier than going through the elb wizard.

ELB's HTTPS termination is mediocre and, last I checked, doesn't offer the best ciphers. A year ago It was impossible to get an A+ on ssltest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ using ELB to terminate SSL.

Not to mention it still needlessly includes a ton of dangerously insecure ciphers just begging to be misclicked.

The current default, ELBSecurity Policy-2014-01 [1] enables ECDSA/PFS and is close to the Mozilla TLS recommendations [2]. Getting an A+ on the Qualys test requires the HSTS header [3], which isn't an ELB issue.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/Devel...

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS#Amazon_Web...

[3] http://mir.aculo.us/2014/04/04/how-to-get-an-a-on-the-qualsy...

ELB scales horrible and can not scale to even tens of thousands of connections per second, let alone handling spikes of 100k/sec simultaneous connections. Even if you get AWS to prewarm to ELB at a higher peak rate, if you spike over those limits you will drop new incoming connections. HTTPS termination is trivial compared to a requirement to be able to actually handle hundreds of thousands to millions of simultaneous connections per second.

Actually, ELB can scale pretty well... but... you need to file a form and they will up your ELB capacity. Totally ridiculous; the situation with CloudFront.

What kind of TTL value would they use for these records? Should something happen to one of the collectors, couldn't that value still be cached by an endpoint or an intermediary?

Even with a short TTL, are there still servers out there that don't respect all TTLs, or has that been eliminated by now?

Everyone should use hosted services for everything. Soon we'll have hosted services for hosted services. (I actually worked at a company that was a hosted service running mainly off of another hosted service + AWS.)

>Amazon Route 53 DNS Round Robin Was a Win

>If you’ve ever used the Internet, you’ve used the Domain Name System, or DNS, weather you realize it or not.

Interesting article, wrong weather used in this sentence.

Thanks for noticing this! It's fixed now.

It seems odd to leave off any discussion about DNS TTLs, and the risk that something like 8.8.8.8 could end up sending them a thundering herd.

What kind of time granularity can you get for health checks on ELB vs Route 53?

ELB Health Check: min, max = (1s, 300s)

Route 53 Health Check: either 10s or 30s

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