As vitrines de personalização da Chaordic estão integradas nos maiores e-commerces do país, o que na prática significa que cerca de 40% dos pedidos do e-commerce nacional passam pelos nossos sistemas. Atender a essa enorme quantidade de requisições com qualidade é um grande desafio, especialmente em época de Black Friday. Em 2011 a Chaordic atingiu um pico de 70 mil requisições por minuto (RPMs) durante a Black Friday. Em 2012 foram cerca de 200 mil RPMs e em 2013 foram 313 mil RPMs (mais de 5 mil requisições por segundo). A figura abaixo mostra o pico de RPMs nas últimas...…

At Chaordic we have been using Apache Cassandra to store data at scale since 2012, when we faced exponential growth and migrated from MySQL. Since then Cassandra is a key technology here, allowing us to scale from a few hundred million to tens of billions requests per month, and growing… In this post we will share some of our experiences at the Cassandra Summit, held in San Francisco from September 10th to 13th this year. well, erm... that's me at #CassandraSummit 2014 The conference had over 2000 participants from around the globe and awesome talks from leading companies in many...…

Um desafio quando se trabalha com sistemas de larga escala é visualizar o comportamento desses sistemas em tempo real. Para isso é imprescindível um painel de monitoramento que permita visualizar as principais métricas e tomar ação quando algo não vai bem. Aqui na Chaordic os sistemas são monitorados 24/7 para garantir a melhor experiência com as nossas vitrines de recomendação. Uma das métricas que monitoramos é a vazão do sistema, que permite saber quantas requisições estão sendo atendidas em um dado instante. No nosso caso, essa métrica está relacionada com a quantidade de vitrines mostradas para os usuários nas lojas...…

Two critical requirements when offering a recommendation service to some of the largest Brazilian web stores are availability and scalability. After all, if our service becomes unavailable, the store customers won’t be able to see our recommendations when they shop online, upsetting both the customer and the partners that rely on our service. We take this requirement very seriously at Chaordic, using the latest technologies to ensure our service will be available 24/7/365, including on peak periods such as Black Friday. One of the systems we use for increased availability and scalability is Apache Cassandra. Cassandra is an open source...…

About two years ago, we published tiopatinhas “An AWS Autoscaling companion that saves money by using instances from the Spot Market”®. In short, Tiopatinhas replaces half of your autoscaling ondemand instances with instances from the spot market. That allows you to save above 33% of EC2 costs depending on the instance type. Now diving into the details, tiopatinhas is a python script that connects to an autoscaling group, monitors cloudwatch data and spot market information. Based on that information, tiopatinhas decides when to launch or terminate an instance via autoscale. If it detects that your application needs to be scaled,...…

Every developer needs to know about what is happening inside the application. We are no different and what we do to achieve this is tracing a lot of our data, from low level system stuff to many high level, application specific metrics. In order to collect application data and plot it, since we use autoscaling, we need to aggregate it over time inside the application, send it to a collector and aggregate it again over instances. For that second round of aggregation we use etsy’s statsd with a few modifications of our own to compose metrics. Those modifications are made...…