The Platform Behind the App “Gauss – The People Magnet”

Kit Blake

Co-founder, Gauss UG

Context

• The smartphone app communicates with the platform through HTTP and REST/JSON service
• Platform interacts with Social Network APIs to fetch data and get realtime updates:
• Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook
• LinkedIn next
• Platform goals:
• Store large amounts of highly connected data
• Keep data in sync
• Get notified and react to events in realtime

Application and Network

• Usual suspects: HTTP / JSON / Python, and Werkzeug (the core of Flask)
• gevent for efficient network I/O: most of the time is spent waiting for Social Network APIs to respond
• ZeroMQ for messaging patterns: PUSH/PULL, PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE, REQUEST/REPLY
• Allows us to break down the application into one-purpose processes:
• Less complexity
• More scalability

MongoDB

• Documents easily map to objects, fast prototyping
• Geographic indexing

Neo4j Graph Database

• Store / cache friends and interests graphs
• Gremlin traversal language for querying, traversing, filtering the graph
• Graph algorithms (e.g. shortest path)
• May switch to Orient DB

Cloud Hosting

• Rackspace Open Stack cloud (sponsorship)
• Managed with Chef: a Ruby system integration framework and domain specific language for automating the cloud (similar to Puppet)

Done!

• Lead developer: Antonin Amand, antonin@infrae.com
• Gauss UG operations: kitblake@infrae.com
• Full info: http://getgauss.com/

Thanks