Scaling Telephony with Python:The Plivo Learnings

Nishad MusthafaPlivo Inc

Saturday, July 6, 13

About me

• First engineer at Plivo

• Dig open source

• Zen of python

• twitter.com/_nishad

Saturday, July 6, 13

Plivo Open Sourcegithub.com/plivo/plivoframework/

ESL

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How does plivo work?

• Plivo gets a call.

• Plivo needs to know what to do ?

• Plivo uses a callback like http://customercallback.com/

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Initial setup

Media Server

DBCustomer API calls

Callbacks

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Issues with this setup

• Business logic vs Telephony

• Code updates

• Scaling Issues

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Solution

Media Server

DBCustomer API calls

CallbacksDjango

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Did that solve it?Yes

Did we go ahead and use it?Not quiet.

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There are still issues

• Performance issues with Django

• Security issues

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Enter proxy

• A lightweight proxy server written in flask

• This acts as both an in and out proxy

• Has the goodness of gevent

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Solution

Media Server

DB

Customer API calls

Proxy

DjangoCallbacks

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So far so good

• Added a django based UI for our existing customers to add and manipulate their user related data.

• There was no current need for an api for manipulation of these data or so we thought.

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New Customer Alert!!• We had a new customer who urgently

needed a bunch of api’s ready in a week to migrate a large number of minutes to our platform.

• We didn’t have any API’s

• We had one week. It wasn’t a friendly mail. It was an ultimatum

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Tasty Pie to the rescue

• Tasty pie from toast driven is an excellent framework to create an API from your django models. We also did evaluate piston. But there were basic issues there.

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Piston is lacking

• /Account/id/Subaccount/

• /Account/subaccountid/

• The above two are apis on the same model

• Piston doesn’t let you do this.

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Tasty Pie BasicsResource

Retrieve List

Retrieve Detail

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Tasty Pie BasicsCreate

Update

Delete

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Tasty Pie Best Practices• Derive ModelResource to create a

Resource type that’s specific to your use case. Eg: Error returning.

• Dehydrate: Use the Resource’s dehydrate function to add data that isn’t available in the models. Eg: cost as a sum of 2 fields

• Filters: The build_filters function allows you specify filters based on fields of models. Be careful using them.

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Speedups

• Johnny Cache

• Django celery

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One week later

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Questions anyone?

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Thank you!!

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