Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Delivery

Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Availability
Stephen Feldman
Sr. Director Performance, Security and Architecture

Quick Bio
Blackboard since 2003
Performance Engineering from the start
Platform Architecture in 2005
Security Engineering in 2010
“Love my job…love my team. If you email me, I will respond.”
@seven_seconds
http://goo.gl/Z4Rq5

A Quick History Lesson of Bb…
First release was 6.0.11 launched within a few weeks of arriving.
Technology shift from Perl to Java through Release 5 and Release 8.
Blackboard was the largest PerlEx ISV in the world in 2003.
Customers were having issues with optimizing Java, Oracle and SQL Server
First benchmark was at Sun in 2004 called the Tunathon.
Learned that Blackboard Learn could scale and could scale to high-levels with a little TLC.

As We Started Growing and Scaling
In late 2004, we started building the Ref Arch as a model for customers
Proved it out in benchmarks, as well as our own hosting facilities.
We needed other players to come in and work with us to help us learn and validate a solution
Key to our success: aggressive port from Perl to Java, earliest adoption of technologies: Solaris10, Oracle 10g, RHL 4 and 5, SQL 2005 and Java 5/6
Willingness to adopt virtualization very early on
Willingness to open our technology stack for affordable solutions such as NFS and CIFS

Where We Are Today
We have multiple customers supporting nearly 1 million users and dozens well over 250k live production users.
Our benchmarks have been successful supporting over 1 million users with greater than 100k simultaneous sessions with sub-3s response times.
The majority of our customers have benefitted from the Reference Architecture and have completely transformed their deployment to support the adoption and growth of the product.

In The Beginning: RefArch I

Focus of RefArch I
Distribution of application and database
Need for load-balancing the application server
Early JVM clustering
Fiber Storage and High-Speed Disks
Low-cost option to use JBODs
Basic operational monitoring
Hardware, Network and Storage
Database
Keep it simple and you will succeed

A Few Years Later Came RefArch II

…Then Marketing Got their Hands on It

Focus of RefArch II

What are we modeling today and future…

Unified Approach Working Together
No Longer Center, but Parallel…

Introducing RefArch III
Logging and Monitoring
Cloud Services
Secure Performance
Analytics
Identity & Access Management
Immunity
Mobility
Web Optimization
Virtualization
& Provisioning
Data Management

Now Comes RefArchIII

Defining SLAs

What is Performance?
Performance is quantifiable and measureable
Performance is also perception
Mostly recognized from a cognitive perspective
Instantaneous
Immediate
Continuous
Captive

What is Scalability?

What is Availability?
High-availability offerings mask the effects of a system failure in order to minimize the impact of access and functional use of a system to a community of users.
Simple Definition:
Percentage of time the system is in its operational state.
You will often hear the concept of 3x9’s, 4x9’s or even 5x9’s
Planned versus Unplanned
Availability = (Total Units of Time – Downtime) / Total Units of Time
8760 hours in a year
Downtime = 10 hours
Availability = (8760 – 10)/8760 = 99.88%

Quick View into Availability Statistics

Automated Provisioning
Simple routine of provisioning systems
Master processes and reduce human error
Balance workloads
Quick recovery
Emphasis on efficient computing

Complete Monitoring and Logging Solutions

Application Lifecycle Management
True application insight and visibility
Business processing mapping to transaction SLAs
Multi-layer correlation
Transaction workflow mapping

Web Optimization Services
Typical Optimization Services
Compression
Domain Sharding
Minification
Consolidation
Inlining
Asynchronous JavaScript
Response Prediction
Browser Caching

Present and Future of Caches
Caches are used throughout Blackboard Learn to manage the life and reuse of data.
Leveraging ehCache presently in Release 9.1
Caches can and should be controlled via the cache-settings.properties file
Insight into the caches can be achieved in the Admin Console and other JMX tools.
Next generation of caches: pluggable caches (use your own) and distributed caches

Steve Feldman
@seven_seconds

Please provide feedback for this session by emailingBbWorldFeedback@blackboard.com.
Scaling Blackboard Learn™
for High Performance and Delivery

Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Delivery

by sfeldman13 on Jul 13, 2011

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Scaling Blackboard Learn™ for High Performance and Delivery — Presentation Transcript