Brian Pitts, Eventbrite
At Eventbrite, engineers are tasked with building systems that can withstand dramatic spikes in load when popular events go on sale. There are patterns that help us do this:
- Bulkheads: partitioning systems to prevent cascading failures
- Canary testing: Slowly rolling out new code
- Graceful degradation: turning functionality on and off in response to failures or load
- Rate limiting: controlling the amount of work you accept
- Timeouts: limiting time you wait for a request you made to complete
- Load shedding: purposefully not handling some requests in order to reserve resources for others
- Caching: saving and re-serving results to lessen expensive requests
- Planning: getting the resources you need in place, before you need them
In this talk you learn about each of those patterns, how Eventbrite has adopted them, and how to implement them within your own code and infrastructure.
Brian Pitts, Eventbrite
Brian studied political science in college, but when his thesis contained more python code than prose it was clear where his true loyalties lay. He’s worked in operations roles for the past eight years and currently carries the pager for Eventbrite. He lives in Nashville with his wife, son, two cats, and collection of 1990s Unix workstations.
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author = {Brian Pitts},
title = {Capacity and Stability Patterns},
year = {2017},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}