Showyou engineers detail distributed architecture in new talk
Tonight, John Mullerleile, Phil Kulak, and Kyle Kingsbury delivered a presentation titled “Scaling at Showyou,” offering a deep dive into the company’s distributed systems stack.
Kingsbury’s portion covered the overall Showyou architecture, including the use of Riak, Solr, and Redis, plus strategies for building robust systems and a comprehensive monitoring setup. He highlighted several open-source projects from the talk, including UState, a state aggregation daemon; Risky, a Riak ORM; and Mtrc, a Ruby metrics gem.
Phil Kulak discussed the company’s importer, built on Node.js, and shared performance stats from that system. Mullerleile went into detail on his projects, including a new Riak backend that binds Solr, LevelDB, and a distributed processing system the team calls Fabric. That backend delivers fast parallelized key listing, range queries, full-text search, and geospatial queries within Riak.
As part of Fabric, the team has also built a distributed queue with replicated failover and transaction support, running on top of Hazelcast and exposed over protocol buffers. The code is still being polished, but the group plans to present it in a future talk once it’s released.
