Sharing Slides with 10,000 People in r/t: Socket.IO and Node.JS in Production

Cinchcast is an innovative new platform that enables large-scale conference calls and webcasts for your business. Our webcasting solution must be able to securely push out slides to tens of thousands of people while synchronizing with the audio stream. In this talk, we will discuss how we used NodeJS and Socket.IO to achieve this goal. Socket.IO has tremendous capabilities to overcome limitations of the web sockets in the browser ecosystem today. However, leveraging and scaling this framework can be both challenging and interesting across multiple servers: How do you keep state? Why do connections begin getting dropped? Is it really secure? We will answer all of these questions in this talk. We will focus on understanding Socket.IO scalability and high availability, and discuss some security pitfalls that you need to watch out for.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy is a CTO of Cinchcast, cloud-based conferencing solution for enterprises, and BlogTalkRadio, the world's largest online radio network averaging 36 million unique visitors a month. Prior to joining Cinchcast, Alex was a Head of Security and Compliance at Gilt Groupe companies, building their team from scratch to a team serving over 1300 employees. Before that, he has worked at Goldman Sachs, Oracle, and Microsoft, where he was a lead technologist building large-scale enterprise software focused on IDM, SSO, authentication and authorization. Aleksandr has been cited in New York Times, ComputerWorld, Observer, and other media. He speaks regularly about software development processes and security. He has a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University. He is also an organizer of NYC Technology Startup (a group of over 1400 entrepreneurs and developers) and NYC REDIS NOSQL meetups. In his spare time, he enjoys wandering New York museums, playing chess, martial arts, and public speaking.

Danny Gershman is a Principal Engineer at Cinchcast. He's spent over 16 years experience developing software and now focusing on R&D. Worked with various technologies, but currently I'm working with .NET, SQL Server, Redis, NodeJS, Socket.IO, jwPlayer. Also teller of bad jokes.