This presentation shows how and why to use queues and workers to decouple and make your application more scalable.

1. Create a Massively Scalable System
with Force.com and Heroku
Travis Reeder, Iron.io, CTO and Co-founder

2. Safe harbor
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3. I am
Travis Reeder
CTO and Co-Founder of Iron.io
Iron.io provides massively scalable and elastic cloud infrastructure
services: IronWorker, IronMQ and IronCache.
Building things to scale is our business.

4. Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process, to handle
a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be
enlarged to accommodate that growth.
Source: Wikipedia

5. Systems integration
Systems integration is the process of linking together different
computing systems and software applications physically or
functionally, to act as a coordinated whole.
Source: Wikipedia

6. The example application
Lead gen form.
User fills out form, stores the info, posts
to Salesforce as a lead and sends user
an email.
Easy right?

7. Easy? Not at scale
 How do you keep your application responding fast at high load?
 How do you deal with spikes?
• Daily deal Site at 8am
• You get TechCrunched
 How do you deal with Rate Limits?
• Rate limits at Salesforce
– 5000 requests per day (208 per hour)
– 5 concurrent requests

8. There is a simple solution
Queues
 Message Queues
 Task Queues

9. Queues
An amazing developer tool, great for:
 Spikability
 Keeping database load consistent
 Decoupling parts of your application
 Improving application performance
• If it doesn’t need to be done while user is waiting, then don’t do it, put it on a
queue
 Integrations / communication between systems

10. Spikability
If you do all your work in your application, you need servers... lots
of servers.

11. Spikability without queues
Need enough servers to handle the maximum traffic you might
see.

12. Spikability with queues
Queues soak up spikes with no performance or data loss.

13. Keeping database load consistent
You decide how fast you want to process, not your traffic.

14. Decoupling / integrations
Using queues to communicate between parts of your system is a
good idea. Splitting your application into smaller parts can also be
a good idea.
 Loosely coupled
 If one part fails, the others don’t
 You can upgrade different parts separately
 Maintain and find issues much easier
 Oftentimes you have no control over it if it’s a third party

15. Architecture overview
Heroku application Salesforce
Boomi
Email

16. The Heroku app
Simple form.
The only thing the controller does is queue up
a worker task.

17. IronWorker task queue
Create a worker and upload it once:
ironworker.tasks.create(“lead_worker",
config.merge(name: params[:name],
email: params[:email],
company: params[:company))
iron_worker upload lead_worker
Then queue up tasks for it:

18. IronMQ message queue
Very simple to use. One side pushes messages onto a queue (in
our example, this is our lead gen app):
The other side pulls them off (Boomi in this case):
A message can be any arbitrary data that both sides understand.
ironmq.queue(“lead”).post(msg.to_json)
ironmq.queue(“lead”).get()

19. Boomi
Boomi enables drag and drop integrations between SaaS and On-
Premise applications via its out of the box connectors.

20. Scaling
• On the front end, we’ve offloaded most of the work and there is no database
to worry about, but if you need to scale it, Heroku makes it easy:
• IronWorker and IronMQ are fully elastic so no scaling required.
• Boomi and Salesforce, the main things to consider are rate limits and other
limits.
heroku ps:scale web=20

22. Let’s Try It!
Grab your phone and go to:
http://ironforce.herokuapp.com
This demo is running on a single Heroku Dyno and it's ready to
handle this room and then some.
I promise I won’t spam you. But feel free to reply and contact me.

23. Travis Reeder
CTO and co-founder
Code can be found at:
https://github.com/treeder/ironforce