Software Engineering Daily

As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets.

In our previous episodes about Uber, we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft, we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services. In shows about Airbnb, we talked about the data engineering pipeline that powers economic calculations, user studies, and everything else that requires a MapReduce.

In today’s episode, we explore the business and engineering behind another online labor platform: Fiverr.

Fiverr is a marketplace for digital services. On Fiverr, I have purchased podcast editing, logo creation, music lyrics, videos, and sales leads. I have found people who will work for cheap, and quickly finish a job to my exact specification. I have discovered visual artists who worked with me to craft a music video for a song I wrote.

Workers on Fiverr post “gigs”–jobs that they can perform. Most of the workers on Fiverr specialize in knowledge work, like proofreading or gathering sales leads. The workers are all over the world. I have worked with people from Germany, the Philippines, and Africa through Fiverr.

Fiverr has become the leader in digital freelancing. The staggering growth of Fiverr’s marketplace has put the company in a position similar to an early Amazon. There is room for strategic expansion, but there is also an urgency to improve the infrastructure and secure the market lead.

Gil Sheinfeld is the CTO at Fiverr, and he joins the show to explain how the teams at Fiverr are organized to fulfill the two goals of strategic, creative growth and continuous improvement to the platform.

One engineering topic we discussed at length was event sourcing. Event sourcing is a pattern for modeling each change to your application as an event. Each event is placed on a pub/sub messaging queue, and made available to the different systems within your company. Event sourcing creates a centralized place to listen to all of the changes that are occurring within your company.

For example, you might be working on a service that allows a customer to make a payment to a worker. The payment becomes an event. Several different systems might want to listen for that event. Fiverr needs to call out to a credit card processing system. Fiverr also needs to send an email to the worker, to let them know they have been paid. Fiverr ALSO needs to update internal accounting records.

Event sourcing is useful because the creator of the event is decoupled from all of the downstream consumers. As the platform engineering team works to build out event sourcing, communications between different service owners will become more efficient.

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In an event driven application, each component of application logic emits events, which other parts of the application respond to. We have examined this pattern in previous shows that focus on pub/sub messaging, event sourcing, and CQRS.

In today’s show, we examine the intersection of event driven architecture and serverless architecture.

Serverless applications can be built by combining functions-as-a-service (like AWS Lambda) together with backend as a service tools like DynamoDB and Auth0. Functions-as-a-service give you cheap, flexible, scalable compute. Backend as a service tools give you robust, fault-tolerant tools for managing state.

By combining these sets of tools, we can build applications without thinking about specific servers that are managing large portions of our application logic. This is great–because managing servers and doing load balancing and scaling is painful.

With this shift in architecture, we also have to change how data flows through our applications.

Danilo Poccia is the author of AWS Lambda In Action, a book about building event-driven serverless applications. In today’s episode, Danilo and I discuss the connection between serverless architecture and event driven architecture.

We start by reviewing the evolution of the runtime unit–from physical machines to virtual machines to containers to functions as a service. Then, we dive into what it means for an application to be “event driven.” We explore how to architect and scale a serverless architecture, and we finish by discussing the future of serverless–how IoT and edge computing and on-premise architectures will take advantage of this new technology.

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The Netflix API is accessed by developers who build for over 1000 device types: TVs, smartphontes, VR headsets, laptops. If it has a screen, it can probably run Netflix. On each of these different devices, the Netflix experience is different. Different screen sizes mean there is variable space to display the content.

When you open up Netflix, you want to efficiently browse through movies. The frontend engineers who are building different experiences for different device types need to make different requests to the backend to fetch the right amount of data. This was the engineering problem that Vasanth Asokan and his team at Netflix was tasked with solving: how do you enable lots of different frontend engineers to get whatever they need from the backend?

This problem led to the development of a “serverless-like platform” within Netflix, which Vasanth wrote about in a few popular articles on Medium. This platform enables frontend developers to write and deploy backend scripts to fetch data, decoupling the responsibilities of frontend engineers and backend engineers.

The tight coupling of frontend and backend engineering was problematic to the development velocity of Netflix.

We have done many shows about Netflix engineering, covering topics like data engineering, user interface design, and performance monitoring. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help.

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Serverless architecture is software that runs without an addressable server. Serverless is made possible by two types of technology: platform as a service providers like Auth0, and functions as a service like AWS Lambda.

With both of these technologies, we can program logic that runs without being deployed to a server.

Functions as a service are cheap and scalable. Write your code for a Serverless function, and the cloud provider will cheaply deploy and execute that function on some server somewhere. The difficult part is maintaining state.

Since Serverless compute instances are ephemeral, you aren’t dealing with a system that will keep track of your state—it is going to disappear eventually.

The ephemeral nature of Serverless code requires us to shift our thinking—but the dramatic cost and simplified scalability make it well worth the effort.

Serverless functions can add complexity in exchange for lower price. Serverless “platform as a service” often lowers complexity at a slightly higher price.

A Serverless database like Firebase handles database scaling and gives you a nice web interface. A Serverless machine learning platform like Google CloudML gives your models scalability and controlled deployment. A Serverless authentication service like Auth0 manages your authentication.

In addition to authentication, Auth0 has built a set of tools to allow SaaS companies to extend their platforms into a sandboxed code execution environment. Bobby Johnson is an engineer at Auth0, and he joins the show to describe the toolbox that Auth0 has developed: authentication, webtasks, and extensibility–and how the world of “serverless” architecture is evolving. Full disclosure, Auth0 is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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Augmented reality applications are slowly making their way into the world of the consumer. Pokemon Go created the magical experience of seeing Pokemon superimposed upon the real world. IKEA’s mobile app lets you see how a couch would fit into your living room, which has a significant improvement on the furniture buying process.

Augmented reality applications can have even more dramatic impact on industrial enterprises.

Have you ever set up a factory? You might need to build a conveyor belt. You might need to put together the parts of a giant machine that extrudes steel. You might need to fix a silicon wafer fabrication machine. It takes an expert to set up these heavy, complicated machines.

ScopeAR is a company that builds augmented reality tools. One of the ScopeAR products allows users to telepresence with each other to collaborate on the construction and maintenance of heavy machinery.

Imagine I am setting up my factory, and I have a complicated piece of machinery (let’s say a conveyor belt) in front of me. I have never constructed a conveyor belt before. I put on a HoloLens, and set up a VoIP call with an expert who has experience with that piece of machinery, and they point out what I need to do by superimposing 3-D arrows, text, and other instructions on my field of vision. They can share my experience and help guide me through the process.

This is such a flexible tool–you can imagine applications for augmented reality assistance being useful in medicine, construction, education and other fields.

Scott Montgomerie is the CEO of ScopeAR and in today’s episode, we talk about the state of AR, how the AR tools from Apple and Google compare, and how the similarity between tools used for mapping the world in AR relate to the tools used to map the world by autonomous cars.

Scott was a great guest, and I hope to have him back on in the future.

We have done some great shows about how to build augmented reality and virtual reality applications. To find these old episodes, you can download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and for Android. In other podcast players, you can only access the most recent 100 episodes. With these apps, we are building a new way to consume content about software engineering. They are open-sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to get involved with, we would love to get your help.

Shout out to today’s featured contributor Edgar Pino. He is working on a real-time chat application for Software Engineering Daily, so that we can have chat rooms for people to discuss the episodes easily. Innovative work!

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