Introducing Java at Wix (scale) / Taboola Load Balancing Production Case Study

In March meetup, we have 2 very interesting lectures: Wix will share why they've decided to write their internal stack also in Java (today it's in Scala and NodeJS) and this process looks like at Wix scale. Taboola will explain how changed their load balancing strategy including open source examined which yielded tremendous performance boost.

Thanks to Taboola for sponsoring the event!

AGENDA

18:00–18:30 Mingling, food, and drinks
18:30–18:40 Opening words
18:40–19:30 How to Boost System Performance with Cache-Aware Load Balancing / Gal Shelach & David Tzur - Taboola
19:40–20:25 Bringing Java into a Large-Scale Codebase: Lessons from Wix / Yuval Perry & Ori Peled - Wix

How to Boost System Performance with Cache-Aware Load Balancing
Taboola’s recommendation engine gets over 800,000 requests per second, all handled within a strict sub-second SLA across thousands of servers and many data centers spread over the world. As such, the effectiveness of our load balancing strategy had a big impact on both our latency and hardware utilization. Over the years we had many iterations to make our load balancing as effective as possible, using different products (HAProxy, LinkerD, OpenResty, Nginx+) and different load-balancing strategies (weighted round-robin, least_connection, least_time) and yet we felt like there's more to be done. In this talk we'll present our approach and how we completely rewrote our load balancing solution to drastically reduce our p99 and improve our utilization by making it more aware of the types of hardware, the quality of the response each server returned and taking into account cache-locality as part of the load-balancing algorithm.

Gal Shelach
Production Engineering team leader in the Infrastructure group. I boast an MSc in Electrical Engineering, though I haven’t quite dabbled in electric engineering. Toting an MBA as well, but you won’t find me managing businesses. I’m a certified financial planner too - and yes, I do dip my toes into that realm occasionally.
Beyond all that, inefficiency is my arch-nemesis, and I’ve been on a decade-long crusade to make systems run smoother. Just for the record, I have a soft spot for dad jokes

David Tzur
David Tzur has spent over 12 years at Taboola, tuning both high-scale systems and his cello. As Director of R&D, Infrastructure Engineering, he's obsessed with data, performance, and making things run faster than they probably should. When he's not optimizing production, he's either looping melodies on his cello or being outsmarted by his two dogs. He firmly believes that great engineering, like great music, is all about rhythm, precision, and a little bit of chaos.

Bringing Java into a Large-Scale Codebase: Lessons from Wix
How do you successfully introduce a new programming language into a massive, established codebase?
In this talk, we’ll explore Wix’s journey of integrating Java into an ecosystem with over 10 million lines of production code. We’ll share the challenges, strategies, and lessons learned along the way.
We’ll also explore modern Java—what it offers today and how we leverage it to meet our needs.

Yuval Perry
Head of backend Engineering at Wix.com

Ori Peled
Server infrastructure TL, Server Group at Wix.com

FOOD
Light food, light drinks, and beer will be served courtesy of Taboola.

RECORDING
We are recording, as always, this meetup and uploading it to our YouTube channel (be sure to subscribe), but please keep in mind asking questions about stuff you don't understand is only possible when you attend the live event.

PARKING
TBD

ADDRESS
Atrium building, floor 32
Zabutinsky 2
Ramat Gan