QuizUp: Zero to a Million Users in 8 Days

This is a talk I held at the AWS Summit in Stockholm 2014, telling the story of QuizUp, the choices that were made and why, and how those choices impacted the success of QuizUp (and our lives) during the days after launch.

Transcript

1. Reykjavík April 14th 2014
   

   View Slide

2. QuizUp?
   • Social trivia game for iOS and android
   • Launched November 7th 2013
   • .. March 6th 2014 on Android
   • Currently 16+ million users
   • One of the fastest growing apps/networks
   

   View Slide

3. QuizUp Background
   • .. started making small, topical trivia apps
   • such as:
   • Eurovision QuizUp
   • Twilight QuizUp
   • Math QuizUp
   • NatGeo QuizUp
   • First: proof-of-concepts for investors
   • Then: Satellites to pull users to QuizUp network
   

   View Slide

4. Engineering Team
   • Small server team (3-4 people, depending on
   perspective)
   • Backgrounds in telecom, finance, design, 

   math and music
   • Me: f/oss devops guy, first in web-tech,

   then telecom (mobile)
   

   View Slide

5. The story: iOS Launch
   • Expected 1M users in 2013
   • Got 1M users in 8 days
   • Capacity planning was hard
   • Executed all scaling strategies within a week
   

   View Slide

6. How was this possible?
   • With careful planning
   • Being in the cloud
   

   View Slide

7. Why and how: use “the cloud”?
   • Mostly in IaaS fashion (aws)
   • Prefer SaaS to in-house solutions
   • Allows a small team to accomplish a lot
   quickly
   • We also use Heroku for many internal apps
   • Intended to use more PaaS
   

   View Slide

8. Why Amazon?
   • Team members had experience with it
   • Industry standard
   • Multiple locations
   • We developed in eu-west-1
   • Production is in us-east-1
   

   View Slide

9. Why Amazon?
   • Great selection of “hardware"
   • Single point for many services:
   • EC2
   • S3
   • Route53
   • CloudFront
   • VPC
   • DynamoDB
   • … etc
   

   View Slide

10. QuizUp Architecture
    • Inspired by
    • 12factor.net
    • Netflix Engineering
    • Most moving parts are scalable
    • Stateless “immutable” app servers
    • Sharded player data
    • Scalable datastores
    

    View Slide

11. View Slide

12. QuizUp app server stack
    nginx
    uwsgi
    Flask+SQLAlchemy
    Postgres Redis ElasticSearch
    Elastic Load Balancer
    HTTP
    HTTPS
    clients
    

    View Slide

13. QuizUp Architecture
    • Worse is (often) better
    • Optimizing is a luxury problem
    • Outsource to SaaS what we can
    • Pusher, DataDog, Pingdom, PagerDuty,
    Travis, Sentry
    • …etc
    

    View Slide

14. QuizUp Architecture
    • A lot inherited from “legacy”
    • Large monolithic quizup-server API
    implemented in python
    • Decoupling now
    • Separate services
    • Routing requests to different ELBs
    

    View Slide

15. QuizUp Services
    

    View Slide

16. How did we prepare?
    • Metrics, metrics, metrics
    • Code freeze — an entire *week* before launch!
    • Load testing (locust, 20x m1.small nodes)
    • 5 weeks of beta
    • Force-update and graceful maintenance
    features built into API and clients
    • Coordinate with Infrastructure vendor:
    • prewarm ELBs
    • Increased instance limits
    

    View Slide

17. LAUNCH!
    me :-)
    

    View Slide

18. View Slide

19. Growth?
    Sharding events
    

    View Slide

20. Downtime?
    • Went from 1 hi1.4xlarge database master to 8,
    in 6 days.
    • Yes there was downtime:
    • First db sharding ~2 days after launch (29m)
    • Second sharding 5 days after launch (90m)
    • Third sharding 6 days after launch (40m)
    

    View Slide

21. The bright side
    

    View Slide

22. What lessons did we learn?
    • Monitoring and metrics PAY OFF
    • Tools to help deal with users
    • Invest in configuration management
    • Dynamic configuration with switches/throttles
    

    View Slide

23. Thanks!
    

    View Slide