https://www.github.com/No9 – @antonwhalley

https://www.github.com/No9

@antonwhalley

Peer to Peer in Production

Cinema Content Distribution

• Content is adverts and films
• Traditionally couriers with DVDs
• 12000+ machines can be in a distribution network
• Hybrid network topology
• Large Files (> 1Gb)

Baseline Solution

• Bit Torrent to parse file and seed network
• Content metadata(Torrent Descriptor) replication provided by CRDT (Commutative Replicated Data Types)
• Management UI provided by a node.js,express and seneca

Further Requirements

(Not all peers are equal)

• Authentication and Authorisation
• Management Application to partition content (even adverts)
• System Monitoring (Wot no tests)

Further Solutions?

• User Authentication and Authorisation provided by a central datastore.
• Content Partitioning dealt with by a kerberosesque cache token based system.
• Application Level Authorisation provided by keys signed by a certificate authority
• Monitoring was simply each node reporting status at a given interval with the results aggregated over a time period as a mongo map reduce.

Lessons

• Unix philosophy FTW!
• Mongo disappears. (Deal With It?)
• LevelDB not remember on the nodes (Why u no windows)
• Some funnies with reconnect using http fell back to TLS
• No continuous deployment :( NPM makes you lazy.
• Performance Driven Development? Yes Please
• Would love to revisit the central certificate authority and non-repudiation problem