Slides about Wordnik's arch

1. Inside Wordnik's Architecture
Tony Tam
@fehguy

2. Who is Wordnik?
• Founded in 2008 by Erin McKean
• "Understand meaning of words
automatically"
• Patented "Free-Range Definition"
technology
• Constructed largest (known) English Word
Graph
We do Discovery

3. It's all about Data!

4. Data?
• Word Graph is 80 S
built by data
reads!
• Runtime answers
needed fast
50M+
Nodes!
80M+
Edges!

5. What we do with Data
• Update the Graph constantly
• Augment our NLP pipeline
• "Reality-based Annotation" with
current, real-world data

6. What we do with Data
• Update the Graph constantly
• Augment our NLP pipeline
• "Reality-based Annotation" with
current, real-world data
Language
is NOT
static

7. What we do with Data
• Update the Graph constantly
• Augment our NLP pipeline
• "Reality-based Annotation" with
Next???
current, real-world data Twitter?
Language
is NOT
static
Tumblr? Wordpres
s

8. Is a 20 year-old corpus good enough?

9. How we do it
• Amazon EC2-based deployment
• Efficiency through constraint-based
architecture
• Small is Big!
• Horizontal scaling by adding servers!
• Yea, we can always go vertical
• Blah, blah, more details!

10. Micro Services
• Services are stand-alone building blocks
• Increase capacity through a "more like this"
button

11. Micro Services
• Big application => micro services
Monolithic
application
"Isn't this
just
SOA?"

12. Micro Services
• Big application => micro services
Monolithic
application
"Isn't this
just
SOA?"

13. Micro Services
• Big application => micro services
Monolithic
application
"Isn't this
just
SOA?"

14. Micro Services
• Big application => micro services
Monolithic
application
"Isn't this
just
SOA?"

15. Not PO-SOA
• This is different
• No proprietary message bus
• Decoupled objects
• Dedicated storage***
• Speak REST
• Develop your services in…
• Java
• Scala
• Ruby
• Php

16. Speak REST?
• Sounds good but…
• REST semantics vary wildly
• HATEOAS vs. practical REST?
/api/pet.json/1?delete (GET)
/api/pet.json/1 (DELETE) Al
/api/pet.json/1 (POST empty) valid!
So…

17. Speak REST?
• Sounds good but…
• REST semantics vary wildly
• HATEOAS vs. practical REST?
/api/pet.json/1?delete (GET)
Peer All
/api/pet.json/1 (DELETE)
Review! valid!
/api/pet.json/1 (POST empty)
Better
Docs!
So…
API
API Styleguide
Council! !

18. SOA makes new Challenges
• It's communication (not easy)
• Need a consumer & provider contract
• Driving force to create Swagger

19. What is Swagger?
• Swagger is…
• Spec for declaring and documenting an API
• A framework for auto-generating the spec
• A library for client library generation
• A JSON-based test framework
• It's open source!
• http://swagger.wordnik.com

20. How?
• Swagger Codegen
• Creates a client based on your Swagger Spec
scala src/main/scala/Codegen.scala
${swagger-spec-url}
Scal
a
Ruby

21. In the Wordnik Workflow
• Jenkins will…
• Build a service library
• Build a stand-alone application distro
• Build an installable image (RPM)
• Build a compatible client library
• Consumers will…
• Declare dependency on a service version
• Use a client for that version
• Be given a list of compatible services, by
cluster, version

22. Back to Data
• Micro services have small(ish) databases
• Share nothing across services
• YES To replica sets
• Deployed to ephemeral storage
• (more in a bit)
• Small by design
• How to keep them small?

23. Keeping Databases Small
• Some easy tricks
• Schema-less => "schema per document"
• Keep field names short!
db.foo.save({user_name:"Tony"})
Repeat
db.foo.save({un:"Tony"})10e9 times!
• Indexes
• They can get *huge*
• Make _id matter!

24. Keeping Databases Small
• Some easy tricks
• Schema-less => "schema per document"
• Keep field names short!
db.foo.save({user_name:"Tony"})
Repeat
db.foo.save({un:"Tony"})10e9 times!
• Indexes
• They can get *huge*
• Make _id matter!

25. Keeping Databases Small
• Don't make _id just an "auto increment"
You're stuck with it! Be smart
• User collection? Try _id: username
• Email collection? Try _id: email
• Date-driven collection? How about _id: "20120502"
• db.logins.find({_id:/^201205/}) 1
7
Be lazy until
you can't
anymore! 1 2
5 7

26. Keeping Databases Small
• DAO or die!
• Fancy index scheme => control access to
collections
NO!!!!
Yes

27. Keeping Databases Small
• If/when you need to shard…
Don't
make
your
clients do
this!

28. Keeping Databases Small
• Again, why keep them small?
• Starting a new replica
• Initial sync
• Index rebuilding
• Backups
• Index Compaction
• Speed
• TCO

29. Keeping Databases Small
• Again, why keep them small?
Everythin
• Starting a new replica g is
• Initial sync easier
• Index rebuilding
• Backups
• Index Compaction
• Speed This can
• TCO take
DAYS

30. Ephemeral Storage?
• Every EC2 instance type has some
(except micro)
• Only available via EC2 API
• Less prone to issues than EBS
• Faster ***
• Included in cost of server

31. Ephemeral Storage?
• Every EC2 instance type has some
(except micro)
• Only available via EC2 API
• Less prone to issues than EBS
• Faster ***
• Included in cost of server
But dies
on host
reboot!

32. Keeping Data Safe

33. Which Zone? Which Region?

34. Which Zone? Which Region?
Arbiter handles
external
connectivity
issue detection

35. How does this really stack up?
• Tuned indexes & access, split with services
• Was: 3 DAS Devices w/18 TB disk
• Now: 21 M1.large + M1.xlarge instances
• 3 Zones, 2 regions
• The Gory Details
blog.wordnik.com/with-software-small-is-the-new-big

36. As for Services
• ~1,000 requests/sec via Swagger-enabled
micro services
• Direct to Consumer via SwaggerSocket

37. What's Next
• Migrating all services to SwaggerSocket
• OSS WebSocket subprotocol
https://github.com/wordnik/swaggersocket
• 25%-100% speed increase (sync & async)
• Discovery via Wordnik

38. If you're Interested…

39. If you're Interested…

40. If you're Interested…

41. If you're Interested…

42. If you're Interested…

43. If you're Interested…

44. If you're Interested…

45. See more:
developer.wordnik.com
swagger.wordnik.com
github.com/wordnik
Questions?