Chen Salomon introduces himself as a data architect at Playbuzz, a 3-year-old company with 100 employees and 30 in R&D. Playbuzz creates engaging content formats for over 7,000 publishers. To scale efficiently, Playbuzz uses Redis for distributed caching, ETL session management, IP location lookups, and more. Their most recent Redis project converts IP addresses to integers for fast location lookups from cached hashmaps.

2. A little bit about myself
Chen Salomon, Data architect– c@Playbuzz.com
First developer @ Playbuzz
The guy that still wakes when shit hits the fan…
Currently leading (data) solutions

3. Playbuzz
3 years old
4 locations (Israel, NY, London, Hamburg)
100 employees
30 in RnD (we are still small…)

4. Seconds on a page
60%78%15
Source: Wall Street Journal, 2014
Changes in internet content
of internet users don’t
read entire articles
Web publishers
get
of traffic through
referrals from
Facebook on
average
User stays only

5. Playbuzz is the king of Engaging Content™
7,000+
publishers can’t
be wrong

6. Formats
Gallery QuizTriviaPersonality QuizListRevealRanked List
Countdown List
Poll
Open List
Photo Caption
Video

7. THE SECRET SAUCE

8. • Keep it simple and super slim – We always try to keep our
production with as few servers as possible
• Be lazy – We pay a lot on insert and barely work on reads
• Know your traffic
• Enabling the business to scale at minimal cost
How we do it?

9. • Object caching
• Production usage
• Keeping items in cache (lazy initialization) – objects (strings)
• List management as sorted sets
• Permissions are hashmaps
Where you can find Redis in our system?

10. • Distributed HTML Output caching
• ETL session management and enrichments
• Session parameters are objects
• IP to location (in a few seconds)
Where you can find Redis in our system?

11. Most recent Redis project
IP to location
• Location objects are hash-maps
• Convert IP to integers
• e.g. IP 10.0.0.138 -> 10 *(256^3) + 0 *(256^2) + 0 *(256) + 138
*(256^0) =167772298
• ZRANGEBYSCORE to find the range (position) – returns the first item
that larger than the IP.
• HGETALL for the returned position
• Challenges
• IP V6 (same idea –different multiplier)
• Empty subnets – You can’t use only lower/upper bounds

12. We are hiring – jobs@playbuzz.com