5 ms·

Fantastic write up article. A few things stood out at me. In no particular order: - Going with Mongo in the first place cost them dearly. CMS are a weird appl

Fantastic write up article. A few things stood out at me. In no particular order: - Going with Mongo in the first place cost them dearly. CMS are a weird application for schemaless. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely weird. I wonder if they would benefit from moving to more structured schema and I'm willing to bet a lot of the migration complexity comes from that in the first place. - God damn that is a long migration. Holy shit. I know tech isn't their core competency but they do seem to have very competent staff. I've worked in places this glacially slow and I get how it can get this bad but it really strikes me as having no right to be. 10 months to migrate .... from the point where they were ready, until they were done. And somehow integration tests got overlooked during all that. - Close call with dynamodb. Bit of a wtf on waiting for the feature to be implemented for nine months though. I'm sure they have an account manager with aws... I definitely think blocking an internal process on such a fragile externality as a closed process upstream publishing a feature is the wrong move and a red flag. Their migration path would have probably been harder with dynamodb too. - I feel the pain of their troubleshooting issues on the load testing step. I can completely see how this can happen. That said it also raises a few red flags to me. Letting something as simple as the load testing step get complex enough to require weeks of engineering is ... Eh. Have more thoughts but I hate typing on mobile. This is a fantastic write up, I love when non-tech companies publish this sort of stuff. And hurrah for postgres.

acjohnson55 8y ago
> CMS are a weird application for schemaless. That depends. If the CMS is managing documents that have flexible structures that are tree-like, it might not be such a horrible idea to model that structure in a document instead of relationally.
- mulmen 8y ago
  Document stores might be great for the C but not so much for the MS.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    Or to put that in context of a basic data structure: C = Actual content to be published MS = User accounts, user permissions, user authentication options, user authentication logging, meta change logs (user X removed tag Y at time Z), behaviour logs (user X viewed revision Y of article Z at time A)... and that's just scratching the surface of a very, very basic CMS. I'm being generous and assuming articles, tags, bylines, and attached media (with full change history) is all "C".

acjohnson55 8y ago

> CMS are a weird application for schemaless. That depends. If the CMS is managing documents that have flexible structures that are tree-like, it might not be such a horrible idea to model that structure in a document instead of relationally.

mulmen 8y ago
Document stores might be great for the C but not so much for the MS.
- sjwright 8y ago
  Or to put that in context of a basic data structure: C = Actual content to be published MS = User accounts, user permissions, user authentication options, user authentication logging, meta change logs (user X removed tag Y at time Z), behaviour logs (user X viewed revision Y of article Z at time A)... and that's just scratching the surface of a very, very basic CMS. I'm being generous and assuming articles, tags, bylines, and attached media (with full change history) is all "C".