SF Django Meetup: Microservices at Prezi

Fail to Success Loop

First, we had Peter Neumark, an engineer on Prezi's DevOps team, talk to us about how the transition to microservices has worked from an operations stand point. Prezi has been making a slow and steady move from Rackspace to AWS, but still has pieces of their architecture living on both. His presentation, the “fail to success loop”, walked us through multiple failures Prezi had in scaling their system. These were great learning experiences for the Prezi DevOps team and made sure to always dissect every misstep in order to not make the same mistake twice.

World Series Champs!

We had a short intermission to watch the SF Giants win the World Series! The game was put up on the big screens and we watched the last inning of the game.

The Need to Use Your Resources More Considerately

Next we had Johannes Schirrmeister, talk to us about some of the improvements that were made while moving to microservices. We took a look at using the Django Debug Toolbar and caching to profile issues in order to come up with solutions. Ultimately, Johannes showed us that when moving to a microservices architecture, it means that there is more latency when making requests from one service to another. This dictates that we have to be more mindful of when you communicate across services and think about when you really need data.

Links! Meetup, Peter's Prezi, Johannes's Prezi