Learn how tscached can make dashboards and charts load 100x faster

Ben Bangert is a San Francisco Bay Area programmer best known for his Python open-source work on Pylons, Beaker, and Routes. He currently works at Mozilla.

On Sept 14, learn how tscached can make dashboards and charts load over 100x faster than a standard configuration of KairosDB.

If you'd like to give a 5-mins lightning talk, sign-up here (https://goo.gl/forms/SmEj0Ag7epBeLVBw2).

Lightning talks:

Post Object Oriented Design - using attr.s and singledispatch instead of classic OO by Moshe Zadka

OSNAP: Python App Deployment using Embedded Python by James Abel

How Nixle's architecture send 1M SMS and Emails a day by Greg Humphrey

Short talk:

Home Automation with Python 3 by Ben Bangert

A short overview of what Home Automation can do, what we need to accomplish it, and why we should care that as much is open-sourced as possible without requiring 'the cloud'. Even better, we'll go over a Python 3 based OSS project that helps automate and monitor a wide variety of devices in the home called Home Assistant and the basics to get started.

Ben Bangert is a San Francisco Bay Area programmer best known for his Python open-source work on Pylons, Beaker, and Routes. He currently works at Mozilla.

Rebellious Magic Methods by Aaron Maxwell

If you'd like more developers re-using your libraries and code, it's critical to design a powerful, expressive interface, letting developers easily express clear solutions to challenging problems. Python's magic methods provide valuable, underused tools for this. And if you're willing to bend some rules and conventions... you can work miracles.

Main talk:

Write Once, Read Never: Caching in the age of analytics by Zach Musgrave

SUMMARY

tscached is a proxy that improves read performance of time series data by up to 1,000x. It’s built with Python and Redis to serve data from KairosDB. We cover its motivation, design, and tradeoffs; show how it improves the performance of complex, high-volume metrics dashboards; and explore the caching techniques inherent to its design.

DESCRIPTION

It’s 2016, and “measure absolutely everything” is the new normal. Servers are cheap, and data is abundant. Time series data drives engineering and business decisions, and its volume quickly approaches infinity if left unchecked.

The sad fact is, most time series collected by an organization will be ignored forever, consigned to the depths of some NoSQL datastore large enough to accomodate them. We cannot know ahead of time which metrics are essential to conducting a thorough postmortem, for instance, so we collect all possibilities and hope for the best. Data ingested grows even faster once we add “serverless” resources like Docker containers or AWS Lambdas into the mix.

Because most time series are written and then never read, off-the-shelf storage and analytics solutions emphasize this common case. Read performance suffers badly in the crossfire.

This talk describes the motivation, design, and tradoffs of tscached. An open source proxy intended for fast reads from KairosDB and Cassandra, tscached is built with Python, Flask, and Redis. It gives up to 1,000x speedups by only re-executing queries upon data it doesn’t have, chunking these requests into subparts, and intelligently merging data back together. Via high data awareness, tscached understands groupings, one-to-many-queries, and complex tagging models. For an organization relying extensively on charts, dashboards, and real-time monitoring, intelligently improving this performance becomes an analytics necessity.

SPEAKER BIO

Zach Musgrave is the Tech Lead for Yelp’s Metrics team, which provides the instrumentation, monitoring, and alerting platforms for Yelp’s Engineering and Operations teams. From graduate school onwards, Zach has worked in performance optimization: from individual systems and code paths to cluster wide service performance for thousands of machines. At Yelp, he’s also worked on large scale deployment infrastructure, Hadoop operations, and key management. Back in the day, Zach was an English major.

Agenda:

6:15p - Check-in and mingle, with pizza and beer provided by our generous sponsor Yelp!

7:05p - Welcome

7:10p - Lightning talks

7:30p - Main talks

8:30p - More mingling

9:30p - Doors close

Please note these important check-in details at Yelp:

1. Doors open at 6:00pm to allow enough time for the check-in process. Before 6:15pm, please wait outside without blocking the building entrance. Attendees on the waitlist will be admitted at 6:45pm, after all attendees who RSVP'd have been admitted. Doors close at 7:30pm.

2. Please update the name on your Meetup account to reflect your true FIRST NAME and LAST NAME. Yelp security will be checking IDs downstairs. If your name on Meetup.com is not the name on your ID, then please enter your full name here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d_oPoxjcAQzOJqozHIzVuFNnOYi7CDrzouywq4U9SUo/edit).

3. Since alcohol will be served at the event, we ask that any underage attendees RSVP directly to the meetup organizers.

4. Unfortunately, Yelp cannot safe-keep your bicycles. Please park your bike on the street or in the bike rack in the Fifth & Mission Parking Garage (https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Fifth+%26+Mission+Parking+Garage+%2F+Yerba+Buena+Parking+Garage/).

**SF Python is run by volunteers aiming to foster the Python Community in the bay area. Please consider making a donation (https://secure.meetup.com/sfpython/contribute/) to SF Python and saying a big thank you to Yelp for providing food, drinks, and the venue for this Wed's meetup.