Seattle Scalability Meetup @ Redfin HQ: Braintree + Cloudant

This meetup focuses on Scalability and technologies to enable handling large amounts of data: Hadoop, HBase, distributed NoSQL databases, and more!

There's not only a focus on technology, but also everything surrounding it including operations, management, business use cases, and more.

We've had great success in the past, and are growing quickly! Previous guests were from Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, Cloudant, Microsoft, 10gen/MongoDB, and more.

This month's guests:

Paul Gross, Braintree

Braintree is a payment gateway, so downtime directly costs both us and our merchants money. Therefore, high availability is extremely important at Braintree. This talk will cover how we do HA at Braintree on our Ruby on Rails application.

Specific topics will include:

Working around planned downtime and deploys:

How we pause traffic for short periods of time without failing requests How we fit our maintenance into these short pauses How we do rolling deploys and schema changes without downtime Working around unplanned failures:

How we load balance across redundant services How the app is structured to retry requests Mike Miller, Chief Scientist, Cloudant

"Scaling Geospatial" http://Cloudant.com provides a globally distributed, document database-as-a-service that scales from megabytes to petabytes. One of the major opportunities (challenges!) we face is adding additional functionality (e.g. Lucene search indexing/query) on top of the base Apache CouchDB API. The most recent product addition is geospatial indexing and query functionality that go well beyond both the scalability and functionality of PostGIS (the popular Postgres' geospatial plugin). I'll provide a description of the product motivation, the technical challenges faced, and the implementation choices that we made to ensure scalability of complex queries across an arbitrarily large collection of nodes in a shared-nothing architecture.

Our format is flexible: We usually have speakers who talk for ~30 minutes each and then do Q+A, plus discussion.

There'll be beer afterwards, of course!

Meetup Location:

Redfin HQ 2025 1st Ave, Suite 500 Seattle, WA 98121

After-beer location: Sonya's c/o eSageGroup

Doors open 30 minutes ahead of show-time. Please show up at least 15 minutes early out of respect for our first speaker.