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That sounds great! Is there a blog post about the tech stack? My main concern with serverless/lambda is cold start time. How do you deal with it? What does the

by hu3 5y ago

That sounds great! Is there a blog post about the tech stack? My main concern with serverless/lambda is cold start time. How do you deal with it? What does the p99 latency look like? Also how do you scale the usual bottleneck which is the database?

sam0x17 5y ago
There is an auto-warming option -- we keep it warmed up every 5 seconds so it's always super peppy -- requests served within 100ms generally, sometimes much faster. Appdex hovers around 0.996 but some webhooks are included in there so it's probably faster in reality.
sam0x17 5y ago
DB-wise we utilize the usual postgresql cluster setup with read clones in several regions. We could easily partition by course or by org if we had to but honestly we could probably scale up to series C+ before needing to do that.
- gregplaysguitar 5y ago
  Out of interest, have you considered moving to a "serverless" db like Aurora Postgres or even DynamoDb, to avoid the cost of unused database capacity at idle times?
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    I'd love to, but when I've tried to set up Aurora, it seems impossible to do multi-regional with postgresql (not multi-zonal, but multi-regional). Would love to hear how to do this if anyone has got it working. Last time I tried was about 2 years ago.
    - gregplaysguitar 5y ago
      Ah ok, interesting - I haven't tried Aurora, my company uses a mixture of RDS postgres and Dynamo. Cockroachdb and Yugabyte also seem like good options but a harder sell for us not being AWS native. More generally though, all of these "newsql" offerings feel a little too good to be true for me, I can't see how you could really have all the relational integrity of postgres with the elastic scalability of a distributed DB without trading something off. Am I too cynical?
sam0x17 5y ago
I've been meaning to put together a blog entry on our whole stack and will post it on HN probably in the next few months!
- hu3 5y ago
  nice! All the best to Arist and the team!
jcytong 5y ago
Discovered Ruby on Jets in this thread and started watching the video on the project page. The author addressed the cold start problem here(timestamped) https://youtu.be/a0VKbrgzKso?t=439 https://youtu.be/a0VKbrgzKso?t=439 Hope it helps :)

by hu3 5y ago

sam0x17 5y ago

There is an auto-warming option -- we keep it warmed up every 5 seconds so it's always super peppy -- requests served within 100ms generally, sometimes much faster. Appdex hovers around 0.996 but some webhooks are included in there so it's probably faster in reality.

sam0x17 5y ago

DB-wise we utilize the usual postgresql cluster setup with read clones in several regions. We could easily partition by course or by org if we had to but honestly we could probably scale up to series C+ before needing to do that.

gregplaysguitar 5y ago
Out of interest, have you considered moving to a "serverless" db like Aurora Postgres or even DynamoDb, to avoid the cost of unused database capacity at idle times?
- sam0x17 5y ago
  I'd love to, but when I've tried to set up Aurora, it seems impossible to do multi-regional with postgresql (not multi-zonal, but multi-regional). Would love to hear how to do this if anyone has got it working. Last time I tried was about 2 years ago.
  - gregplaysguitar 5y ago
    Ah ok, interesting - I haven't tried Aurora, my company uses a mixture of RDS postgres and Dynamo. Cockroachdb and Yugabyte also seem like good options but a harder sell for us not being AWS native. More generally though, all of these "newsql" offerings feel a little too good to be true for me, I can't see how you could really have all the relational integrity of postgres with the elastic scalability of a distributed DB without trading something off. Am I too cynical?

sam0x17 5y ago

I've been meaning to put together a blog entry on our whole stack and will post it on HN probably in the next few months!

hu3 5y ago
nice! All the best to Arist and the team!

jcytong 5y ago

Discovered Ruby on Jets in this thread and started watching the video on the project page. The author addressed the cold start problem here(timestamped) https://youtu.be/a0VKbrgzKso?t=439 https://youtu.be/a0VKbrgzKso?t=439 Hope it helps :)