Backend Teardown: Muut | Hacker News Reader

Backend Teardown: Muut

scalescale.com

48 pointsmxpxrocks1025 comments

Curious on the Docker usage in production, are they using host networking or another way of doing load balancer integrations?

(me, I'm a fan of vulcanproxy[1], even if it is a bit young)

[1] - http://vulcanproxy.com/

good question. I'll let them know about this thread. I don't know off hand. Vulcanproxy looks good. First time I've seen it.

Vulcan looks neat because it is configured centrally via etcd (thanks CoreOS). Simply push changes to etcd and vulcan hosts ingest the changes. Though, it is hard to imagine a much better http reverse proxy than nginx.

I'm using Vulcan on CoreOS to route between a few backend containers for several static sites and it has been going great for a few months now.

Disclaimer: CoreOS employee

CoreOS is looking really tight.

I'm the frontend developer of Muut.

We are not using Docker on the main API server since last time we checked it out the CoreOS / Docker combo could not deal with the load we had. Now that both of these are much more stable we are going to have another shot.

We are using the host networking for the services currently on Docker. Load balancer and primary API endpoints are all running outside of Docker so there isn't a huge networking load for us with Docker.

Would have liked to hear more in-depth about your Redis setup and production gotchas?

they did a very transparent post on the production gottcha a few months ago. https://muut.com/blog/news/april-2014-service-failure.html

This blog entry offers more detail on the Redis setup: https://muut.com/blog/technology/redis-as-primary-datastore-...

Great, I was looking something like Muut. Looks friendlier than Disqus. Before I sign up, does anyone know, on how to plan to monetize their free service?

Edit: found it - if you want to style or extend it, you can opt to pay a fee.

You can embed Muut on your site and it becomes a true part of the page. You'll have complete CSS control and there is no need to pay for that. The free version is a full forum and commenting solution with unlimited data and traffic.

looks great, props. So I can use Muut so that it looks like it's on my own domain?

Yes, embedding is done by inserting a couple of lines of html, and styling to make Muut look like the rest of your site is easy with the included CSS designer tool. You can also write CSS by hand if you wish.

Nice post on Muut's backend design.

Just wondering if replacing Redis with AerospikeDB would help them reduce the cost even more. Now that Aerospike is opensource.

hadn't realized it had been open sourced so recently, just 8 days ago was the HN discussion on AerospikeDB being open sourced:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093476

thanks for the link. I wonder how it compares to tokumx

AerospikeDB makes bold claims. has anyone used it?

I'm testing it out and it seems pretty legit if you need a big, big key value store and don't want to wrangle redis or memcached shards.

Non-Java drivers are a bit behind, but nothing seems to have the same 95%tile latency, fast failover, SSD performance for actual read loads, and relatively easy scale out.

how did the testing go? any other findings?

Just heard of this project for the first time. Their website seems very salesy and lacking the open source spirit.

They gave a "sponsored" talk at Velocity along with a company that provides an ad bidding platform. But also had not heard about it otherwise.

we used Tokumx for http://blog.maxcdn.com/learned-stop-worrying-love-logs/ and the write performance vs mongo was incredible. I think the cluster is doing ~250,000 writes per second across six boxes with SSD space being the bottleneck. I'm really curious to spin up AerospikeDB. There's no Tokumx comparison I could find and they talk about very high reads. Curious to see write heeavy applications.

Redis for us almost operates as a set of application servers. We push a great deal of logic into Lua that we compile so that tons of back and forth operations aren't necessary. This also limits the data sent back to the API servers since only the structures needed are sent back.

We're rather coupled with Redis as a result with much of the application logic in Lua and our data structure designed around Redis structure types and commands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com