Slides from my DjangoCon Europe 2013 talk: Does Your Stuff Scale?

1. Does your stuff scale?
Steven Holmes
http://p.ota.to

2. Potato?

3. Does your stuff scale?
1. Django + Google App Engine
2. Scaling an organisation + culture

4. Non-technical
Scalability
Technical
1. Load
2. Functional
3. Organisational
4. Geographic

5. Part 1
+

6. 1. Auto-scaling
2. Services & APIs
3. No sysadmin
Why Google App Engine?

7. Just make good things.

8. App Engine: caveats
1. Sandbox
2. File system
3. Portability

9. What is it?
• Django ported to NoSQL
• GitHub, open source
• Django 1.4, Django 1.5 beta
Pros
• Familiar APIs
• Portability
• Works in production
How do you run it?
• Clone repo(s)
• ./manage.py runserver
Cons
• Familiarity can be misleading
• Can feel ‘heavy’ / kludgy
Django non-rel github.com/django-nonrel

11. What is it?
• Lightweight skeleton
• Django + App Engine models
Pros
• “Best of both worlds”
• NDB
• Automatic caching, structured data
How do you run it?
• Clone repo
• dev_appserver.py .
Cons
• Learning curve
• Portability
Djappengine github.com/potatolondon/djappengine

13. What is it?
• Custom Django database backend wrapper for Django's MySQL backend
Pros
• Fully supported Django
• Flexibility
• Unpredictable reporting
How do you run it?
• Create a CloudSQL instance
• 'google.appengine.ext.django.backends.rdbms' in settings.py
• ./manage.py syncdb
Cons
• More setup
• Possibly not as scalable as datastore?
App Engine + CloudSQL Search “Django + CloudSQL”

15. Part 2

16. Technical
Non-technical
Scalability
1. Load
2. Functional
3. Organisational
4. Geographic
+

17. • Planning
• Caching
• Offline tasks
• Preparation
◦ Load tests
◦ Profiling (e.g. using app stats)
Scalability - Load

18. Technical
Non-technical
Scalability
1. Load
2. Functional
3. Organisational
4. Geographic
+

19. • Django!
◦ Documentation, Community
• App Engine
◦ Services & APIs
■ Memcache
■ Taskqueue, mapreduce
■ Search
■ Email
■ Images
◦ Versioning
■ 10 testable versions per app
■ http://0.myapp.appspot.com {live}
■ http://1.myapp.appspot.com {not live}
■ http://some-feature-branch.myapp.appspot.com {not live}
■ A/B testing / traffic splitting
◦ SDK
Scalability - Functional

20. Technical
Non-technical
Scalability
1. Load
2. Functional
3. Organisational
4. Geographic
+

21. • Be a minimalist
• Remove bottlenecks & overhead
• Just make good things.
• Internal apps
Scalability - Organisational

25. • Be a minimalist
• Remove bottlenecks & overhead
• Just make good things.
• Internal apps
◦ e.g. wiki, recruitment, deployments, checklists
Scalability - Organisational
• Integrated and centralised
◦ Google Apps domain
• Security
◦ HTTPs

26. Technical
Non-technical
Scalability
1. Load
2. Functional
3. Organisational
4. Geographic
+

27. Just make good things.

28. Questions?
• Potato lab > http://p.ota.to/lab
• GitHub > github.com/potatolondon
• App Engine > developers.google.com/appengine
• Django non-rel > django-nonrel.org