Computer Science

EBtree - Design for a Scheduler and Use (Almost) Everywhere

What is the focus of your work today?

Currently I work on making sure that HAProxy is and remains the fastest and most widely used software load balancer today. My team and I work on improving and extending HAProxy. We constantly try to find new ways to integrate it into existing and emerging platforms and environments. We know that HAProxy is often an indispensable piece of software for our users and as they migrate through their infrastructure lifecycles so does HAProxy.

And what's the motivation for the talk?

The motivation for the talk is to remind software architects and service architects to think outside of the box. Even though we often have to resort to using off-the-shelf components to develop software faster and our services faster, investing effort into particular performance critical parts of our stacks can really provide long term benefits in various unforeseen ways. For us in this example, this is investing in binary trees and our environment was optimizing for CPU cache sizes and minimizing memory allocations. That's where we started our improvements and they cascaded upwards through our software stacks, but any place is a good place to take an off-the-shelf component and see how it can be improved and replaced.