Velocity New York
New York, New York
2015-10-12 to 2015-10-14


Speakers
Bridget Kromhout
Peter Shannon
Description

At DramaFever, the largest streaming video site for international content, we operate a next-generation internet TV platform using Docker, Chef, Packer, and more to manage the AWS instances serving our main Django application and Go microservices. We’ll detail how we build and scale our infrastructure to serve more than 20 million viewers.

Abstract

At DramaFever, we operate a next-generation internet TV platform with offerings ranging from international dramas with original content to AMC’s Sundance Documentary site, a “screams on demand” horror site, and beyond.

At peak load, we serve tens of thousands of requests per second, and our AWS instance count autoscales up 10-20x throughout the week. In order to scale, we’ve used a variety of open-source tools and innovative techniques to manage our fleet of instances serving our main Django application and Go microservices, including using Docker in our production request path (for almost two years now) to a recent overhaul of our deployment pipeline using golden images built with Chef and Packer.

Working on a small distributed team, we’ve needed to practice effective communication to maintain our pace of change while also keeping our sites highly available. We’ll touch on the remote-work tooling and culture that enables this.

We’ll detail how we’re reducing our time to production and increasing our infrastructure maintainability. We will also share some of the pitfalls and corner cases we have been working through along the way. Attendees will leave with practical tips they’ll be able to implement right away, as well as inspiration for the possibilities inherent in a fully containerized infrastructure.

Scaling Next-Generation Internet TV on AWS With Docker, Packer, and Chef from bridgetkromhout