Optidash Is an Image Processing and Optimization API

Jun 28, 2021

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In this episode of Running in Production, Przemek Matylla talks about building an image processing and optimization API with mostly C, Python and Node. It’s hosted on bare metal servers in a data center and has been running in production since 2019.

Przemek talks about handling 20-50 million+ daily API calls, how they’re using C, image detection techniques, using Lua scripting with nginx, building their own servers in a data center, using boring technology and much more.

Topics Include

3:17 – An average day has about 20 million API calls, busy days have 50m+
4:11 – Breaking down where C, Node and other languages are being used
6:46 – What happens when you upload an image to their API
9:06 – Really figuring out the file type of something that’s been uploaded
11:54 – Dealing with edge cases as they come up but preparing a bit ahead of time
14:45 – Switching from Core ML on Apple hardware to Tensorflow on AMD hardware
19:43 – There’s no framework sitting on top of the Node API server
22:28 – The customer facing web dashboard is using Express, the marketing site is Jekyll
24:41 – They’re mostly B2B so feature requests end up being 1 on 1 calls
25:23 – Handling payments with Stripe and using a Node / Angular app for it
28:04 – Using Lua with nginx for rate limiting, also nginx is their load balancer
31:05 – You can’t go wrong with boring and predictable technology
31:47 – MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch are all running on 3 nodes each
32:18 – Having nearly instant access to a ton of data helps figure things out
34:52 – What it was like finding a freelance C developer
35:55 – Sending webhooks out is controlled by a separate Node Bull driven app
38:41 – Dealing with GDPR compliance and storing images on GlusterFS for 1 hour
40:50 – Going with bare metal servers in their own data center over the cloud
44:51 – The servers have 32-256GB of memory and a range of different CPUs
46:34 – Having spare parts and dealing with hardware failures
49:15 – About 50 servers run the latest Ubuntu LTS and are managed with Puppet
51:22 – The deployment process for a number of different services
54:19 – It takes ~30min to replace a drive and every service is tripled up
56:48 – The database servers are replicated and there’s alarms and alerts set up
58:56 – Rate limiting was put in place for limiting API calls to customers
1:01:12 – There’s custom payment rates depending on each customer’s requirements
1:03:06 – Best tips? Over provision like crazy and monitoring lets you sleep at night
1:03:31 – Do what works for you, don’t copy another company because it works for them
1:05:48 – Check out https://optidash.ai, their tech blog and GitHub account

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Optidash Is an Image Processing and Optimization API

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