We recently delivered this presentation titled “How to Scale Big on MySQL? Break a Few Rules!” as part of Database Week here in New York City. The presentation is a lighthearted, and informative take on how Bazaarvoice Engineering has been able to take MySQL to billions of requests per month. The slides and video are […]
(Always One More Thing…) Who Are We? The Ad Management team here at Bazaarvoice grew out of an incubator team. The goal of our incubator is to quickly iterate on ideas, producing prototypes and “proof of concept” projects to be iterated on if they validate a customer need. The project of interest here generates reports […]
At Bazaarvoice, we’ve pulled off an incredible feat, one that is such an enormous task that I’ve seen other companies hesitate to take on. We’ve learned a lot along the way and I wanted to share some of these experiences and lessons in hopes they may benefit others facing similar decisions. The Beginning Our original […]
Every year at Bazaarvoice we bring on a new class of Summer interns and put them to work creating innovative (and educational) projects. At the beginning of the Summer interns choose from a list of projects and teams that interest them. From there they are embedded in a team where they spend the rest of […]
We are pleased to announce a new open source contribution, a Java based JSON to JSON transformation tool named Jolt. Jolt grew out of a BV Platform API project to migrate the backend from Solr/MySql to Cassandra/ElasticSearch. As such, we were going to be doing a lot of data transformations from the new ElasticSearch JSON […]
Greetings all! In the world of SaaS, wiser men than I have referred to Operations as the “Secret Sauce” that distinguishes you from your competition. As manager of one of our DevOps teams, I wanted to talk to you about how Bazaarvoice uses the cloud and how we engineer our systems for maximum reliability. You […]
Over time, even technologies that are tried and true begin to show their age. This is especially true for data stores as the shear amount of data explodes and site traffic increases. Because of this, we are continually working with new technologies to determine whether they have a place in our primary stack. To that […]
In the previous post, I provided a rundown on what Bazaarvoice Labs is, our process and why it is important to have flexibility in our toolset choices. I now want to give you some tool examples in the following categories: Operational Tools Server-side Application Development Environments Data Storage and Management Client-side Tools Measurement Tools Operational […]
The Problem Every few weeks we release a major version of our software. Throughout the release, we have many processes in place to ensure we don’t cause regressions in our latest code. Since we serve up millions of pages each day, regressions in scalability are just as important as failures. At code freeze, which is […]
Near real time analytics on a large data set = hard! About two years ago we found ourselves adding a lot of analytical features to the Bazaarvoice Workbench, our client facing analytics product. We were implementing various new dashboards, reports, and alerts. Dashboards needed to be near real time, so we were forced to either […]