Crowdtap's stack has evolved over 5 years from a single large Rails application to smaller microservices. This allows for more autonomy, easier testing and deployment of separate components. The current stack includes MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Angular, RabbitMQ, Redis, EC2 and S3/Cloudfront. It has moved to a more modular service-oriented architecture (SOA) for improved scalability of development teams and systems.

1. Crowdtap Stack
“small is beautiful.”

2. What is Crowdtap?

3. -Fun diverse team
What makes us a fun place to work?

4. -Sense of startup urgency without going
crazy
-Small, autonomous “tracks”
What makes us a fun place to work?

5. …And some parties don’t hurt
What makes us a fun place to work?

6. -small is better than LARGE
Rigorous test coverage - thoughtbot DNA
Now show me the stack...
Core Beliefs

7. -MongoDB - (TokuMX)
-ElasticSearch
-Angular
-RabbitMQ
-Redis
-EC2
-S3/Cloudfront
Core Technologies

9. One small rails app
5 Year Evolution - Late 2009

10. One BIG rails app - tough to manage.
Evolution - 2010,2011

11. Rails → Rails API Data Layer
small front end apps
History and Evolution - Early 2012

12. “If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application
calls more than 100 services to collect data and construct
the page for you.”
— Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com, 2006
SOA - A system composed of several loosely coupled
applications, each existing in isolation with it’s own
database
But it wasn’t enough… SOA Time

13. -“Scalable dev team”
-Separate tests
-Separate deployments
-Separate owners
-(Damage control)
Benefits of SOA

14. Promiscuous - Application level pub-sub
History and Evolution - Late 2012
+ =

15. -Heterogenous replication
-Remote observers. The ability to observe remote model changesher.
-Publish virtual attributes
Promiscuous (benefits)

16. -Sniper - targeting engine
-Paparazzi -
Stalks your social networks
-Iris - Email
Small Backend Apps - Early 2013

17. -“Dynamic Assets Poller”
2 minute deploys
-Poll commit hash from s3
-Perform lookup for that bucket
Front End Deployer - Late 2013

18. SpineJS → AngularJS
Evolution - 2014

19. ...And then back to this

20. -More Angular
-More ElasticSearch
-More Mobile
Late 2014, 2015??

21. “Making great products is only possible
when complex technology can be presented
in a simple, beautiful and complete form.”
Smaller, more modular, makes lives
easier...
….Q/A
To conclude