Startup Technology Pitfalls and How to Avoid them

BRYAN SHORT Originally from California Graduated from UCLA 9 years at Microsoft Office Windows Casual Games Xbox Live

BIG BETS

Architecture Technical Stack Storage

BIG BETS - Architecture

BIG BETS - CLOUD

EC2 Route 53 RDS S3 Glacier CloudFront MORE!!!

BIG BETS - CLOUD CloudFront Pricing for Dedicated IP Custom SSL is simple. Because of the added cost associated with dedicating IP addresses per SSL certificate, we charge a fixed monthly fee of $600 for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour.

BIG BETS - CLOUD In Search of New CDN

BIG BETS - CLOUD Requirements Host CDN powered by S3 SSL custom cert required. Fast and Performant Price Doesn’t need to be fastest

BIG BETS - Technical Stack

Requirements Able to service http requests Community of active developers Open source friendly Enables engineering excellence Modern

BIG BETS – Mongo? Node / Angular / Express all made total sense. Our data is inherently very relational. What to do?

BIG BETS – Technical Stack How did we do? JavaPHPRubyJavascriptPython , 701 Packages available on NPM!

BIG BETS – Technical Stack How did we do? Not so good things: NPM unreliable  Not all modules created equally!

BIG BETS – Technical Stack A Tale of Two Modules Module 1Module 2 Days since last commit6020 External DependenciesNoYes Open Issues17418

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Deployment If adding a single dependency to deployment overcomplicates it; than your deployment process is broken.

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Deployment Like most engineering, it’s easiest to do the wrong thing.

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Integrated Pipeline

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Test Code Adds incredible value when we you have a product which has logic and behavior to validate. Inside Social is lacking in test code.

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Test Code

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Test Code How are we doing?

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Test Code Corollary! Code that we put onto our clients sites needs to be tested, and ready for prime time production. The worst thing that we can do is break a customer’s site.

BIG BETS – Technical Stack Test Code Corollary! I am amazed at how many brands, lack any sort of test site / infrastructure and just drop us onto their production site.

BIG BETS - Storage

Short term

BIG BETS - Storage Short term Requirements: Handle lots of writes quickly (implied in memory) Be able to serialize itself, such that state can be restored on another machine SDK

BIG BETS - Storage Short term How did we do? One month later Aerospike released V3. December 16 th, 2013 Amazon unveils Kinesis service.

BIG BETS – Data Store Data Store

BIG BETS – Data Store How did we do? real-time-big-data-analytics/

BIG BETS – Data Store How did we do? A UW big data study:A UW big data study: BigQuery is very easy to setup and run queries and does not require any manual configuration of clusters; it automatically scales up according the dataset size. But this can be a disadvantage as well, since the user cannot tune the system according to his/her needs. However it has limited SQL language support and does not scale up well on complex queries involving multiple joins and nested subqueries.

BIG BETS – Data Store How did we do?

BIG BETS – Data Store How did we do? What are we missing? Full SQL Data Removal / Archival What works well? Pricing NoSQL

BIG BETS - Architecture

How are we doing? We’re able to accomplish our mediate goals! Great Success!

BIG BETS - Architecture How are we doing? Can we solve our long term problems? Real time? Complex system that evaluates what social marketing tactics, and learns from them?

The road ahead Once we have something stable, that people can utilize it is time to revisit some bets. Inside Social will be reexamining short term data store + data store options.

Thank You ? Any Questions