You Too Can Be a Radio Host or How We Scaled a .NET Startup and Had Fun Doing it!

Aleksandr Yampolskiy and Rob Blackin

Who Are We?

Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy, CTO (alex@cinchcast.com)Previously head of security and compliance for Gilt Groupe companies, in charge of securing IT infrastructure, secure architecture, PCI/SOX compliance, etc. Various leadership roles in Goldman Sachs, Oracle, Microsoft building scalable, enterprise software for IDM, SSO, AuthN/AuthZ. Ph.D. in Crypto Tools for Efficient Distributed ComputingHobbies: chess, Edward Hopper, Ray Bradbury, martial arts, lately foosball and coffee.

• Rob Blackin, VP of Development and Operations (robblackin@cinchcast.com)• Previously Director of Development at IDT in charge of systems for

global businesses in 9 diff countries• CIO of VoiceNet subsidiary of Destia.• Hobbies: competitive volleyball player, as well as basketball, father of

3 girls and lately cranking out code at midnight.

Company Overview

• Cinchcast provides cloud-based software and services for creating, distributing, measuring and monetizing voice-based content• BlogTalkRadio is a consumer-based media property

Founded in 2006 ~30 Employees 10 of them in Tech HQ in New York, NY Millions of pageviews a

day Powering over 1,500

hours of content creation every day

Confidential © 2011 Cinchcast - All Rights Reserved 3

BlogTalkRadioOur Owned Media Property

The Cinchcast Platform

Confidential © 2011 Cinchcast - All Rights Reserved 5

DEMO TIME - LIVE

Confidential © 2011 Cinchcast - All Rights Reserved 6

Our Approach

• “Be brief, be bright, be gone”

• Don’t go chasing hot technologies of the day. Instead ‘mitigate your top problems’

• Achieve “essential”, then worry about “excellent”.

• Be a “how team” instead of a “no team”.

• Build security into the software development lifecycle.

Love And Other Drugs 

Current Technology Stack

.NET 3.5 C#Jenkins + NunitSauce On Demand - SeleniumGomez + NewRelic for monitoringJQueryASP.NET and MVC 3IIS 6SQL SERVER 2005Windows Server 2003 and 2008Red 5Asterisk, PactolusAiCacheAptimize

Development Environment

Visual Studio 2010StyleCop / Resharper experimentation.Scrum methodology for large features + adopting Kanban for various bug fixesJIRA for project management + GreenhopperSvn, Jenkins

Metrics

Not using metrics for your dev process is like landing a plane without any instruments in a storm.

Code coverageSite throughputNumber of critical security bugsTime to fix Blocker/Critical/Major JIRA issues.Percentage of developers using your site.Etc.

What Do Metrics Tell Us?

Architecture

BlogTalkRadio 2007

BlogTalkradio 2008

BlogTalkRadio 2009

BlogTalkRadio 2010

BlogTalkRadio 2011

Evolution Summary

• 2008 – Multiple web servers via Coyote LB and Scaleout for session state

• 2009 – Read Only databases through replication and aptimize for combining JS, CSS and Images on the fly.

• 2010 - aiCache for caching html, second farm on amazon for specific traffic, specializtion of web and database servers.

• 2011 – Contendo cdn, services framework, retired aptimize due to Continuous Integration process, Service broker queuing.

Telephony Overview

Cinch.fm Overview

Decoupling spaghetti code

Search Service

AuthN Service

AuthZ Service

Cache Service

• Decoupling key pieces of the code into separate services possibly written in diff languages.

• Can be used either as DLL imports or through RESTful calls on the network.

BlogTalkRadio Cinch.FM Cinchcast

Services

Based on Martin framework (https://github.com/thegrubbsian/Martin)Lightweight .NET framework mapping URLs to actions.Modified framework to reflect interfaces and automatically expose all their methods.

Service Philosophy

• RESTful model, using JSON• Not all data is relational, so database isn’t

always a good medium.- Logging is key to detecting problems.- Reinventing the wheel can be a good thing.

Elastic SearchOur first service is moving search off DB.Settled on Elastic Search (http://www.elasticsearch.org/ ) is based on top of LuceneA novel project. Unlike SOLR, it can handle real-time search applications.

Due to Ryan Sonnek

Elastic Search

Caching

“Donut caching” : caches most of the page except a few dynamic regions.

.Net caching via Fixed Expiration

myCache.Insert("LiveChatRooms", liveRooms, myDependency, DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(2), Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);

.Net caching via Sql Dependency Expiration SqlCacheDependency myHDDependency = new SqlCacheDependency(DBName, "Genres"); myCache.Insert(DictionaryOfGenreEntityByID, myDictionary, myHDDependency);

Data Caching via Scaleout return DCacheSoss.GetObjectFromNamedCache(CacheName, UniqueKeyName);

CDN caching of JS, CSS and Images via Contendo and Limelight

HTML Caching via CDN – Contendo, Limelight, aiCache

Cool Tech Projects On the Horizon

Personalization of radio shows based on customer’s preferences.Build out of SOA Cinchcast platform from Python, .NET, Java components communicating as RESTFUL JSON-based servicesMoving real-time search to ElasticSearch (right now just for RSS/bots)Improving our caching layer performance (too many hit misses)A/B testing framework

Conclusion

• Architecture improvements are gradual and sometimes you make mistakes (e.g. Aptimize)

• Don’t chase hot technologies (e.g. MemCached mania). Sometimes reinventing the wheel is good.

• REST+JSON > SOAP+XML

• Be brief, be bright, be gone.

We’re Hiring. Why Work Here?• Well-funded profitable startup

used by millions.• Patent-pending radio tech

utilized in a new way.• Medical/dental/etc. benefits.• Great office space in mid-town

right near subway.• Flexible hours. Top-notch

compensation + stock options.

Open Positions:• Front-end Engineer • Sys Admin• Tech Lead

• If you are good we’ll find a role for you : jobs@cinchcast.com