Building and running 200K msgs/sec WebSockets platform @ Helpshift

May 2018

7 Mon

8 Tue

9 Wed

10 Thu 08:15 AM – 05:25 PM IST

11 Fri 08:30 AM – 06:20 PM IST

12 Sat

13 Sun

NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru

Building and running 200K msgs/sec WebSockets platform @ Helpshift

Submitted Mar 7, 2018

Section: Full talk Technical level: Intermediate

I will talk about how we built and maintained a WebSockets platform on AWS infra.
You can expect to have insights about,

How to build and evovle a WebSockets platform on AWS
How we made the platform more resilient to failures known and unknown
How we saved costs by using right strategy for auto-scaling and load balancing
How to monitor a WebSockets platform

Outline

Building / Running a high scale websockets service on AWS
- Building and Evolving
  - JVM + Clojure + http-kit
    - Websocket server
  - ZMQ
    - Transporting messages
    - ZMQ patterns
  - Zookeeper
    - Using it with ZMQ brokers
  - How it all fits together? Overview of Architecture
- Monitoring
  - Statsd + Grafana
  - Debugging and Audit patterns using Grafana and Sensu
- Compression and Costs
  - gzip support for websockets to save costs
- Auto-Scaling
  - Load balancing using least load and Herald
  - Herald is an internal system which does feedback load balancing
- Conclusion
  - Long running connections poses different scaling challanges
  - Look for performance impacting metrics instead of number of connection when scaling and load balancing
  - Auditing and debugging is difficult for ephemeral data but it is important for quality of product
  - Get the protocol right so adding new capability becomes simple

Speaker bio

Staff Engineer @Helpshift | I love to code on server, client and everything between! Like movies,anime,books/manga, Clojure,JS,mecha,GITS,algos,good music

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/kapilr/building-and-scaling-a-websockets-pubsub-system

Rootconf 2018