The team at Fandango heartily embraced NoSQL, using Couchbase to power a key media publishing system. The initial implementation was fraught with integration issues and high latency, and required a major effort to successfully refactor. My talk will outline the key organizational and architectural decisions that created deep systemic problems, and the steps taken to re-architect the system to achieve a high level of performance at scale.

1. NOSQL: DOING IT WRONG BEFORE GETTING IT RIGHT
6-27-2015/Lawrence Trinh

2. Content

3. Goals
• Accommodate new products
– Content
– Marketing
– Schema changes
• Start using Node.js for services and web tier
• Move content out to AWS
– Improve abilities to scale up/down

4. Background
• Web App
– Host website (www.fandango.com)
• Backoffice tools
– Map data
– Modify existing content
• SQL Server
– Store data

5. Enter Couchbase
• CDC
– Monitor SQL Server changes
• Export
– Grabs changes and pushes to
• Import
– Contains rules to load data
• Custom query language
– Sit in front of couchbase to
pull/join data

6. Challenges
• Rules
– Large number /data type
– Import grows quickly
• Breaking points
– Lots of places things can
go wrong
• Second source of truth
– New tools write directly to
Couchbase

7. Enter Microservices
• Data store
– Simplified flow
– Centralized
• Flexibility
– (Re)building should be less
risky
• Service ownership
– Easily distributable

8. Q&A