PGConfNYC Keynote Notes (Gilt)

One of the keynote presentations for PG Conf NYC was a founder of Gilt Groupe (a site for flash sales of fashion items). This is an interesting business arena, in that the application has an inherent spiky nature to load.

The speaker observed that people tend to form small groups based on how many people we can keep track of (100-150), and that corporate org structures tend to influence software architecture. Consequently they introduced a concept within their corporate IT called “micro services”, where teams have the ability to provision resources (e.g. a docker instance running postgres + some application) – the cluster of dependent services then resembles clusters of human relationships, where some powerful people are at the center, fanning out toward newer or more rural notions.

The nice consequences of this approach are that it assumes a natural level of failure (so you have to plan for it), and forces everyone to build relatively independent services, a similar model to how AWS was formed. Assuming failure also forces you to build in things like alerting, which (apparently) makes auditors happy, while also forcing you to run your infrastructure correctly. It sounds like they also have a concept where they can grant someone a temporary privilege to view a production database with an expiring account, which is a neat idea.

Like the other keynote he had a few interesting ideas for areas to improve postgres: append-only tables (in a similar vein to immutable data) and tables that store diffs (again with concepts around immutable data).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *