Listen to the co-founders of PubNub
Interviewed on Teczhing
Scaling in the Clouds
The term Cloud is buzzy.
For many people it is an auto-scaling server framework.
To others it means hoards of on-demand virtualized OS hives.
These two definitions can be true at the same time.
Both are true for PubNub.
We've taken the route of auto cloud scaling for our message bus.
Based on the number of current standing connections
we grow or shrink our running server count.
There are two thresholds that we've marked at 20% and 80%.
The 20% resources mark means
there are more servers running than needed.
We will spin down servers until the resource level reaches close to 50%.
80% usage invokes the opposite by launching extra servers.
And of course each server knows to launch our
messaging bus daemon automatically on boot.
This scaling approach makes the most sense for PubNub.
But what about the standing connections
which may still be attached to a system
that gets shut down?
These will auto re-route to a running box by re-requesting
a connection port from an origin server which monitors
analytics and system health.
There is no special magic with cloud scaling.
Cloud scaling is specific to your architecture.
Focus on simplicity and efficiency.
Do not build fancy slow frameworks.
And Make sure to split components logically into
separate services.
Abstract all business rules from your cloud service
somewhere else.
Simplicity is most important.
Techzing Interviews PubNub
Hosts of Techzing Jason and Justin interviewed
the co-founders of PubNub.
Discussions rounded several conversation topics
including cloud scaling, business spanning and
options for real time solutions.
PubNub started as an
auto scaling horizontal messaging bus.
Now we provide demonstrations of vertical solutions.
Open Source examples of vertical business pathways include:
Mouse Speak as interactive collaboration,
Traffic Beat shows analytics,
and
Simple Chat will explain the basics.
Our next vertical target will be gaming.
We'll launch a simple yet fun real time action game.
Building real time applications is easy because
the PubNub real time platform is complete.
Scaling in the cloud isn't 100% on the tech dev side,
it involves biz dev too.
Decisions must be made in directions of growth potential.
Business and Technical development lean on one another.
Cloud Services used by PubNub
Here at PubNub we use a combination of three cloud services.
Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services EC2 and RackSpace Cloud.
We take advantage of the strengths for each of these services.
App Engine is used for simple analytics and
tracking of customers.
AWS EC2 and RackSpace Cloud are used together for redundancy as
core connections running our message bus.
App Engine tracks customer API Keys.
It is also the face
the primary PubNub website.
We host applications in the Application Showcase on App Engine
and distribute the PubNub JavaScript Push API payload.
We use Rackspace and Amazon for our long standing connections
provided by our proprietary messaging bus service.
Each virtual cloud box runs our custom distributed socket pusher.
Stable Cloud Services
PubNub has a complete cloud architecture.
We launched three weeks ago and continue to grow faster than expected.
What is our Success Juice?:
Solve the technical hardships in scaling with simplicity,
provide an API focused on simplicity
and rendered a fine strawberry jam for application bagels.
How can we help you with Real-Time?
