Randy Shoup

CTO at KIXEYE, former Dir. Google App Engine and eBay Chief Engineer

As CTO, Randy brings 25 years of engineering leadership to KIXEYE, ranging from tiny startups to Internet-scale companies. Prior to KIXEYE, he was Director of Engineering at Google, leading several teams building Google App Engine, the world's largest Platform as a Service. Prior to Google, he was CTO and Co-Founder of Shopilly, an ecommerce startup, and spent 6 1/2 years as Chief Engineer and Distinguished Architect at eBay, building several successive generations of eBay's real-time search infrastructure. He was Chief Architect and Fellow at Tumbleweed Communications, and has held various engineering and architecture roles at Oracle and Informatica. Randy has extensive experience operating Internet-scale services at eBay and Google. He speaks regularly at industry and academic conferences about distributed computing, large-scale infrastructure, and reliability. @randyshoup

The Game of Big Data: Scalable, Reliable Analytics Infrastructure at KIXEYE
Track: Modern Big Data Systems

Location:

Abstract:
As a maker of real-time strategy games for web and mobile, KIXEYE's business depends on deep insights into how players play our games. By analyzing player behavior in a rich and flexible way, we are able to better target our efforts around user acquisition, game balance, player retention, and game monetization. By storing and analyzing data in standard ways, our data scientists are better able to take learnings from one game and apply them to another.

This session will describe KIXEYE's newly-minted modern analytics infrastructure soup-to-nuts, from Kafka queues through Hadoop 2 to Hive and Redshift. It will outline our efforts around power and flexibility, experimentation and iteration, componentization and testability, and reliability and replayability. It will further share our lessons learned in building, testing, operating, and enhancing this mission-critical piece of our infrastructure.