RUG::B

How do API access methods influence developer adoption? Provide a SDK, design a REST (Hypermedia) API, integrate with adapter frameworks? Making those decisions has a clearly underestimated effect on developer adoption. As well, learn about the influence of: authentication methods, output formats, OSS standards, design, documentation, etc.

Lowering entrance barriers to API data is key to drive internal and external innovation. An easily understandable API a.k.a. Developer Experience (DX) drives usage, reduces support costs for providers and developer costs for consumers.

When people aren’t talking about Docker and containers, they’re usually talking about serverless architecture — code that runs without servers. How is that possible? Well, technically, the code still runs on servers, but you’re not the one in charge of managing them. It’s kind of like the cloud, where people just accept that data goes in the cloud and comes back out just the way you requested it. Of course, we know it’s not that easy. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scene. The same holds true for “serverless” code execution… and it’s really cool.

How exactly does it work? To explain and illustrate, I’ll be talking about AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway. AWS Lambda allows you to focus on code by completely removing the need to think about servers.

Due to its very dynamic nature, the hotel business presents a number of engineering challenges. Prices and availability change constantly, hotels sell their inventory via multiple channels, etc.

At HotelTonight, we’re handling constant inventory and price updates from multiple sources for thousands of our hotels. We also need a robust notification engine for broadcasting change events to various parts of our distributed system.

In this talk, I’d like to describe how we’re able to scale our distributed hotel inventory and rates storage using an append-only store built on top of MySQL and the Sequel gem, keeping both writes and reads fast. I’ll also be comparing trade-offs of various alternative approaches.