HBO Max: Using Canaries for Outside-in Validation

Опубликовано 28 декабря 2021, 16:57

HBO Max's operational experience team has built a system which uses canaries to enable outside-in validation for their web application. What this means is that they can test and verify what customers are seeing, and capture the results of these tests, trigger alerts based on these results. These show up on a status app that internal stakeholder teams use. They can see the last and historical runs, and document and store the artifacts from each run for debugging purposes. The HBO operational experience team has focused on 3 core categories for these validations: customer journeys, configurations, and content quality.

The application architecture consists of Cloudwatch Synthetics, S3, AppSync, Amplify and Lambda. The Cloudwatch Synthetics canaries are deployed and run on time-based triggers in multiple AWS regions globally. The Status App is hosted on Amplify, making requests to AppSync to fetch metric data from the canary runs. AppSync in turn triggers a Lambda handler that queries the canaries data from AWS Cloudwatch Synthetics and artifacts in S3 via the AWS SDK. The status web app then display the overall status and the associated artifacts (HAR files, screenshots, logs) for each of the canary runs. This makes it easy for ops and customer care teams to get visibility into both behavior and performance issues that customers are seeing in close to real time.

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