It’s a new year and it’s time for another report on how fast (or slow) our sites are. If you are new here, our previous report looked at the average load time for our four major types of pages, as well as the 95th percentile load time. The inspiration for this type of post came from our friends at Etsy. Continue reading
Here at Wayfair, we have thousands of suppliers we work with in order to provide our products to our customers. To automate the bulk of these interactions, we use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), so that we can trade documents back and forth. FTP is still one of the predominant methods for transferring these documents, so we have had to build a robust FTP solution to handle this traffic.
As we have mentioned before, the main source control system we use at Wayfair is SVN, with TortoiseSVN as our client. One of the things we love about SVN is the ability to add commit hooks, or checks that run when someone tries to commit a file to source control. By having a few key checks we can prevent bugs, ensure consistent coding practices, and generally have a cleaner codebase.
FreeBSD has spent the last few years implementing awesome Solaris-based features such as DTrace and ZFS. Here at Wayfair, we use FreeBSD on our servers and our development environments. As a security engineer for Wayfair, I’m tasked with many fun projects. I get to test out different configurations and applications in FreeBSD. Naturally, I set up a FreeBSD 8-STABLE VM to do my testing.
ZFS gives you a lot of flexibility and stability. I decided to go with ZFS on my VM so that I could emulate OpenIndiana’s boot environment (BE) system. For an example on how boot environments work, please refer to the OpenSolaris documentation.
Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules around browser support. This is an important topic, but it has been covered fairly extensively in other articles, so I’m not going to dive into it too much here. Instead I am going to talk about specific progressive enhancement techniques we use at Wayfair to improve site performance.
One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP. The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one that our founders were familiar with. After 8 years of working with it, we had pushed it to the limits and decided we’d get more benefit out of moving to a new technology.
We certainly take technology seriously around here and work quite hard at trying to get it right, so it definitely means a lot when we’re publically recognized for these efforts. I was therefore quite proud last Thursday night when Wayfair was honored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) by being named “2011 Company of the Year” among privately held companies.
The MassTLC is an organization focused on fostering entrepreneurship, encouraging the innovative use of technology and recognizing the successes of companies who develop and deploy technology across industry sectors. Wayfair was up against four other great companies as finalists for this award: Acquia, Endeca, Karmaloop and Kiva Systems. Thank you, MassTLC for this great honor.
If you haven’t already read the overview of our deployment system or the architecture of our deployment server you might want to check those posts out first.
In this article I will discuss how we deploy code in a unique way that gives us all the flexibility of the symlink method without requiring a symlink.
Part of the decision on how to setup our deployment system was determined by the need to roll forward and roll back our deployments as quickly as possible. We also needed a way to do this atomically, so that no errors occurred when the code was physically being copied to the webservers.
If you haven’t heard about the ESC Conference yet, you should check it out!
It’s a new conference this year, giving us all another place to congregate and discuss running code and systems at scale. If you’ve been to a devopsdays conference before then you will be familiar with and enjoy the opportunity to have a full day of Open Spaces!
The first day of the conference has a great line-up of talks, including one from our friends over at Etsy, and two talks from the Wayfair Engineering team! Jonathan Klein will be presenting “Deep Dive Frontend Optimization” and Dan Rowe (me 
) will be talking about monitoring with “Graphite, Statsd, and Graphite-Tattle : Simple metric collection meets self-serve alerts”. We hope you can make it!
Last January Eric Ries was kind enough to host a continuous deployment breakfast at Wayfair.
It was a great discussion, and we were happy to learn that we have independently arrived at similar conclusions over the last 9 years, and built a system that aligns closely with some of the principles that Eric advocates. The learning aspect and continuous improvement approach to the Lean Startup formula is an integral part of our method here, and why we resonate with Eric’s message.
Today Eric is back in town and speaking at an event at the Harvard i-lab.
As a way to help spread the word about continuous improvement, the Lean Startup movement and our new engineering blog describing how those fit in at Wayfair we are going to be giving away 10 copies of Eric’s book.
The first five blog posts mentioning the new engineering.wayfair.com site gets a copy of Eric’s new book. Post a comment below with a link to your post so we know where to look. To help get the word out, tweet this post and we’ll pick 5 random tweets to get books as well!
