Alternatives to Actix

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

Another major decision was to adopt Elixir and Phoenix Framework - the DX (Developer eXperience) is pretty similar to what we know from RoR, but this tech is running on the top of rock-solid Erlang platform which is powering planet-scale telecom solutions for 20+ years. So we're getting pretty much the best from both worlds: minimum friction & smart conventions that eliminate the excessive boilerplate AND highly concurrent EVM (Erlang's Virtual Machine) that makes all the scalability problems vanish. The transition was very smooth - none of Ruby developers we had decided to leave because of Elixir. What is more, we kept recruiting Ruby developers w/o any requirement regarding Elixir proficiency & we still were able to educate them internally in almost no time. Obviously Elixir comes with some more tools in the stack: Credo , Hex , AppSignal (required to properly monitor BEAM apps).

One of our top priorities at Pinterest is fostering a safe and trustworthy experience for all Pinners. As Pinterest’s user base and ads business grow, the review volume has been increasing exponentially, and more content types require moderation support. To solve greater engineering and operational challenges at scale, we needed a highly-reliable and performant system to detect, report, evaluate, and act on abusive content and users and so we created Pinqueue.

Pinqueue-3.0 serves as a generic platform for content moderation and human labeling. Under the hood, Pinqueue3.0 is a Flask + React app powered by Pinterest’s very own Gestalt UI framework. On the backend, Pinqueue3.0 heavily relies on PinLater, a Pinterest-built reliable asynchronous job execution system, to handle the requests for enqueueing and action-taking. Using PinLater has significantly strengthened Pinqueue3.0’s overall infra with its capability of processing a massive load of events with configurable retry policies.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Pinterest to discover and do what they love, and our job is to protect them from abusive and harmful content. We’re committed to providing an inspirational yet safe experience to all Pinners. Solving trust & safety problems is a joint effort requiring expertise across multiple domains. Pinqueue3.0 not only plays a critical role in responsively taking down unsafe content, it also has become an enabler for future ML/automation initiatives by providing high-quality human labels. Going forward, we will continue to improve the review experience, measure review quality and collaborate with our machine learning teams to solve content moderation beyond manual reviews at an even larger scale.

Hey, so I developed a basic application with Python. But to use it, you need a python interpreter. I want to add a GUI to make it more appealing. What should I choose to develop a GUI? I have very basic skills in front end development (CSS, JavaScript). I am fluent in python. I'm looking for a tool that is easy to use and doesn't require too much code knowledge. I have recently tried out Flask, but it is kinda complicated. Should I stick with it, move to Django, or is there another nice framework to use?

Another major decision was to adopt Elixir and Phoenix Framework - the DX (Developer eXperience) is pretty similar to what we know from RoR, but this tech is running on the top of rock-solid Erlang platform which is powering planet-scale telecom solutions for 20+ years. So we're getting pretty much the best from both worlds: minimum friction & smart conventions that eliminate the excessive boilerplate AND highly concurrent EVM (Erlang's Virtual Machine) that makes all the scalability problems vanish. The transition was very smooth - none of Ruby developers we had decided to leave because of Elixir. What is more, we kept recruiting Ruby developers w/o any requirement regarding Elixir proficiency & we still were able to educate them internally in almost no time. Obviously Elixir comes with some more tools in the stack: Credo , Hex , AppSignal (required to properly monitor BEAM apps).

Hello everyone, I plan on building a platform that supports 100s of forums out of the box, it would give the user the ability to create forums, where other users can comment, post images, and videos (the size of videos would be limited). Each forum would have the ability to trend. I have been doing a lot of research and I have arrived at Golang and Erlang as the backend languages and PostgreSQL as the DB. Erlang would be used for the routing of chats and messages, while Go would be used to manage the forums. We would also be implementing a one on one chat system like WhatsApp chat, where users can add contacts.

Please I would like to know if the languages picked are appropriate for this project. Suggestions would be appreciated.

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

We chose AWS because, at the time, it was really the only cloud provider to choose from.

We tend to use their basic building blocks (EC2, ELB, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS) rather than vendor specific components like databases and queuing. We deliberately decided to do this to ensure we could provide multi-cloud support or potentially move to another cloud provider if the offering was better for our customers.

We’ve utilized c3.large nodes for both the Node.js deployment and then for the .NET Core deployment. Both sit as backends behind an nginx instance and are managed using scaling groups in Amazon EC2 sitting behind a standard AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

While we’re satisfied with AWS, we do review our decision each year and have looked at Azure and Google Cloud offerings.

#CloudHosting #WebServers #CloudStorage #LoadBalancerReverseProxy